When I touched the first time this book, The Vampire A New History by Nick Groom I felt a sensation of elegance, warm, peace and love: and reading this book I can tell you that it is not surprising. This one is a monumental, beautiful, accurate study about vampires, their birth and myth analyzed starting from the past centuries, focusing on the Enlightenment for then arriving at the modern books and productions. This amazing, enchanting, researched book about vampires was written for remembering the first important story, The Vampyre by John Polidori at that time in the court of Lord Byron, but to me it gives back all the possible powerful and dignity at this demoniac creature, in our society seen and revisited in many different ways during these past decades.
Vampires, with the time, became commercial creatures, and a lot of people, fields, took advantage of the interest created by these nocturnal creatures.
Groom's book spaces through various disciplines, forensic studies, realistically digging into graves, searching for corpses, analyzing the behavior of some blood-sucker bats, but also trying to define, thanks to weird episodes occurred in particular in East of Europe, why people started to being obsessively interested at these kind of monsters: "dead" people not anymore alive in the common sense of the word but in grade of living thanks to blood-sucking; this blood sucking meant contamination and horror and at the same time new life for the vampire.
In most cases, I thought reading the book, that the cases of infections and new illnesses sometimes without doubts were caused by the superficial behavior taken when bodies were re-exhumed without any kind of precaution because of this spasmodic love for the horror: this behavior brought more illnesses undoubtedly.
There were some weird episodes, as we said. A man died, tells the author, and was buried, but for a reason or another he reappeared to the neighbors all happy and cheerful; scared, they told everything to the priest who practiced an exorcism and later cut the head of this man for killing him. In general all people accused potentially of being vampires once buried, where again re-exhumed and after that they followed the procedure for trying to delete the force of the devil from the body; the last act was the cremation. The person needed to be completely "deleted" from the face of the Earth. Every signal, once opened a grave of a suspected vampire, looking at his corpse, analyzed with morbidity, see at the voice, mouth and veins could become real hysteria. In the past it was still unknown what happened when a man was buried. We know now everything about the process of deterioration of a corpse: it's more than known that hair and nails continue to grow for more than 3-4 months after the departure of the person; at that time no one knew it, and it meant for that person/corpse a probable consideration of being classified as a potential vampire.
Blood of certain people killed for heavy reasons donated for being drunk at sick people. If they suffered before, imagine later.
It was trendy to extract tooth at corpses also in the past centuries; you would think for being re-sold.
Yes, but for being transplanted. They were expensive tooth and they brought at a secure death or big infections the person who choose the tooth of a dead person as a "new" one.
While there was this kind of hysteria, what religion said about vampires? What was the official position?
While the Protestants talked of pure fantasy closing any door to vampires without many compliments, the Catholic church fed and nurtured this fantasy.
Mr.Groom analyzes the vampire reading him under a more religious aspect: the blood that he is sucking is an anti-Eucharistic ritual.
The vampire must sucks blood for a living but this action doesn't pass through compassion, humiliation, pain, sufferance; it doesn't save men as it happens to Jesus Christ: it is not a passage for a salvation if not an egoistic one. The Vampire is a creature, who, without any feeling, without any heart, without anymore technically blood, if not the one sucked from the body of other people, must kill, must destroys, must be cause of sufferance and devastation. It's not incorrect to say that a vampire is a creature that feeds himself with his own cruelty and dissolution, because heartless and not anymore a living creature, but at the same time not a dead man.
Not only: as the author will remarks, Polidori with The Vampyre, published at first as if written by Lord Byron and creating for this reason a big din because lived by Polidori of course as an outrageous gesture, a vampiric one maybe, who knows? influenced profoundly Mary Shelley and his Frankenstein, born thanks to the good intuition of Polidori for these creatures. The profound influence of Polidori's short tale, was massively more important than what we can think and imagine.
The final part of the book is about Bram Stoker and Dracula. Very well known book, personally I like it a lot because it is an epistolary book: the author remarks that Stoker donated new morbid treats at the Vampire, the modern one as we intend it, characterizing him not just like a cruel creature but also as a lascivious one, donating him that sex appeal that he wouldn't never have lost anymore; a characterization, important to remark this one, heavily influenced by The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
The two authors were in contacts, and Bram Stoker married a lady close to Oscar Wilde. It is not so unthinkable that Stoker has taken some bits from Dorian Gray, and many many other products and publications: so this book after all is not at all an original tale and the analysis of Groom donates new light in this sense; where John Polidori acted with originality, using as example after all someone close to him, Lord Byron, Stoker, for presenting sensationalism accumulated tales, material and other writings for being used later and from the most diversified parts. Three of Stoker's brothers were doctors and this one played an important role in the construction of the book. Also the location chosen by the author according to Groom not the happiest one.
The Vampire started to have distant connotation from the original one. He became a perverted, someone in grade to create offenses at children, (vampires girls kill and eat children for example) women, men; a corrupted soul not just because he needs blood for surviving. Deviance starts to be sexual one as well.
It is not distant to add that with Stoker and its creature, Dracula, was born a new genre of vampire, a "literary mutation" in grade of changing the course of the vampires's story; Dracula is still influencing with its characterizations our society. Groom will also analyses the connection felt by certain people about vampires, serial killers and mass shootings murderers.
A society, this one, more than fixated with vampires of every sorta.
It is a vampiric society this one, under many aspects and more than the ones previously seen; to my point of view only when these creatures will rest some bit in peace and will be forgotten, and a new model of society and also creatures, maybe more angelical and tranquil will be taken in consideration, it will want to say that the world is returned in the good direction. After all, the creatures of the fantasy more famous and wanted, are just the mirror or our society.
The book ends taking in considerations of the newest and beloved productions seen recently on the big screen or TV: from Vampires Diaries to Twilight.
Highly recommended, this book is a beautiful and serious study and a new wind; maybe these words will donate after a lot of confusion a different idea of vampires to the world; more old-fashioned and real although always scaring.
A great gift for Halloween! this one.
I thank Yale University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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