Customer Reviews

The Vampire

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Rev. Summers wrote this book in the late 1920s/early 1930s, which wasn't all that long ago (Freud and Einstein were still alive and working at the same time), so, one of the scariest things about this book is that Summers actually BELIEVED in all this stuff -- vampires, werewolves, witchcraft, evil spells, the whole nine yards. Summers even converted to Catholicism because he thought Catholic rituals were the best defense against all that supernatural evil lurking everywhere. "The Vampire" remains THE source of information about vampirism around the world. He quotes long passages from other works in their original Latin, French, and Greek, and provides no translation. I could sort of fake my way through the Latin and French, but not the Greek. Nonetheless, you'll learn more about vampires from this book than any other. You'll learn that the typical vampire isn't the undead aristocrat, like Dracula, nor is he the teen hottie from the "Twilight" series. Vampires were wretched peasants who led wretched lives. They were (are?) filthy disgusting creatures that, across cultures, came in various shapes and sizes. The undead floating vampire head with its entrails hanging out (I forget which culture this one comes from) is especially hurl-inducing. And did you know that a dead werewolf sometimes comes back to life as a vampire? The vampire as described by Summers is much like our modern notion of the rotting, brain-eating zombie. It was Dr. John Polidori's book "The Vampyre" (c. 1819) that transformed the vampire into the undead aristocrat Lord Ruthven, and the mid-1840's penny dreadful "Varney the Vampyre" continued this notion, leaving the door wide open for Stoker's "Dracula" in 1897. But that a very well-educated man like Summers could actually believe all this stuff is as scary as the subject of vampirism itself. In the next "Twilight" movie, try to imagine Bella swooning over a floating head with dangling guts.