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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A manual for understanding the vampire community, July 7, 2009
There's been a significant increase in the amount of vampire-related material in the popular media recently; vampire fiction has become more varied and more accessible, and with it, mainstream culture is becoming more acquainted with the concepts both of vampire fiction and of vampire reality. Fans of mainstream television and bestseller novels will now be familiar with the vampire as a cultural icon, and may have picked up on the fact that there is a real-life subculture out there which shares a name, maybe a bit of fashion-sense, maybe a bit of terminology, with the familiar tropes of fiction. They may have seen a recent talk show or documentary, where guests spoke of themselves as "real vampires," or read an interview with a community member online or in a local newspaper. However, despite this swell of interest in vampire fiction, and the attention it has brought to the real-life Vampire Community, there have been few materials about the Community produced for anything other than entertainment purposes. Respected members of the Vampire Community have been interviewed by these shows (often, they have agreed to the appearances to ensure that their community gets a say in how it is portrayed); as a result, many of the shows produced for educational TV channels have been more informative and less biased than they otherwise would have been, and many are a decent informal introduction to the Vampire Community. However, they're still entertainment - sensationalist, steeped in "spooky" music, and treated by the networks as a Halloween special. The fact remains that there is a distinct interest in the Vampire Community on the part of mainstream culture, and until this book, there has been a dearth of accurate, scholarly information about it.
In this sense, the public has really lucked out with Joseph Laycock's "Vampries Today;" this is a solid work of scholarship, it's smart and informed, and makes its arguments skillfully. The writing is appropriate for a scholarly and academic audience, but accessible enough to appeal to a mainstream, general audience. This is not an easy trick, but Laycock pulls it off well enough that this title will be equally at home on the Barnes and Noble bookshelf or in the stacks of your university's library. "Vampires Today" is informed by solid research, and is presented to the reader in a way that will shed light on the vampire fiction phenomenon and the Vampire Community alike.
Laycock did what no academic researcher before had really bothered to do - he studied the Vampire Community as if it were any other subcultural group. He researched the Community first-hand, he met with many representatives from the diverse sub-cultures within the Community, and he applied existing social and philosophical theory to what he found. In the process , he examined the previous work done on the Community, and exposed the prejudices, the incorrect assumptions, and the outright failure to comprehend that many previous analyses have offered. Many previous works have taken the Vampire Community as an anomaly, and then attempted to explain why self-identified vampires were pathological, delusional, or dangerous -- outliers in an otherwise orderly world. Laycock has taken the Vampire Community as a working part of the greater society that its members participate in, and used it to explain how the Vampire Community is a product of, even a function of, mainstream society's ideas about self and identity.
Anyone interested in understanding the Vampire Community from an academic perspective will find "Vampires Today" useful, especially in the realm of dismissing previous unhelpful theories. Several chapters are devoted to sorting out the problems that researchers traditionally have in understanding the Vampire Community. Laycock neatly dismantles almost thirty years of spurious psychological, psychiatric, religious, and medical "explanations" of vampirism, calling on his knowledge of the reality of the vampire experience to demonstrate the spuriousness of these analyses.
In their place, he offers a thorough exploration of the internal diversity of the Vampire Community, key distinctions based on the subculture's own terms and analyses. He uses the accounts given by real vampires to provide an explanation of vampirism, not as a cult, a delusion or a psychopathology, not as a "new religious movement" or monolithic rejection of mainstream spiritual values, but as an "identity group," one option among many, which individuals in modern Western society use to construct their selves.
Insider readers will find that this is an attentive and informed ethnography; as other reviewers have pointed out, the author remains unbiased and objective. His perspective will be refreshing to participants in the Vampire Community who are accustomed to the inevitable drama which some authors in the past have injected into their accounts. With the exception of the questionable cover art (usually the domain of the publisher, not the author) there is no "spooky music" backdrop to this story, no supernatural sub-plot running through the text.
For those in the Vampire Community wondering whether "Vampires Today" will represent you accurately, you will likely be pleasantly surprised. Some authors, especially the chief detractors and panic-mongers, tend to cherry-pick the groups within the Community that confirm their (faulty) theories, or focus on the most flamboyant and visible subcultures, and ignore the existence of the rest. In contrast, Laycock offers a thorough and accurate exploration of the internal diversity of the Vampire Community.
Readers from within the vampire subculture may also find several of Laycock's assertions useful; his ideas about the "vampire milieu" will shed light on the murky and often repudiated relationship between vampire folklore, fiction, and Community. The construction of vampirism as an "identity group" may be appealing for many Community members who sensed the solidity of the Community but had no theoretical framework to put it in. The author's assertion that vampirism is an "essentialist" identity is a formalized, theoretical way of framing an assertion that vampires themselves have been making for years. This approach will assist vampires in talking to academia about themselves, and provides a philosophical context that can shift the conversation about self-identified vampires from one of pathology to one of discovery and self-integrity, from sickness to health.
"Vampires Today" covers every aspect of why the Vampire Community is difficult for researchers to understand, it dismantles faulty thinking about the Vampire Community and about the phenomenon of modern vampirism, and it uses attentive research to provide the reader a framework by which to understand not only the vampire identity, but also the way identity and self-narrative function in our society in general. "Vampires Today" can inform the reader about vampirism, but it also spells out what vampires can offer the mainstream: the technology of self-exploration, and the processes of constructing identity out of self-discovery, meaning out of metaphor, and community out of shared experience.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fascinating Work, July 5, 2009
First of all, ignore the cover. There's nothing over the top or melodramatic about Laycock's study of modern vampirism. Instead, this is a thoughtful, balanced look at a subculture which is commonly sensationalized by the media and, from time to time, sensationalized by itself.
Self-identified "real vampires" represent one of several movements popularized and galvanized by the internet. Laycock offers an detailed history of the movement, including its origins in ceremonial magic, paganism, vampire films and literature, and even role-playing games. He neither attempts to demonize nor romanticize his research subjects: this is an entirely unbiased approach.
Anyone interested in vampires - real or fictitious - will find this a fascinating read. Those researching vampires or any other identity group emerging from the internet will find this indispensable as a resource.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, thorough, clear and non-judgmental, June 23, 2009
Laycock's "Vampires Today" is an excellent example of well-executed ethnography. With a simple, unblemished curiosity, he examines the lives of modern American communities of self-identified vampires; in so doing, he shreds the illusions fostered by them. Not gangs of criminals, or weird psychopaths, or burgeoning serial killers; America's modern vampires aren't any stranger than anyone else with a non-mainstream lifestyle. If the goal of good ethnography can be said to prevent the demonization of strangers, then Vampires Today can be rightly said to have achieved it.
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