American Vampires: Fans, Victims, Practitioners by Norine DresserAfter reading the title, I had large expectations of this book. Fans ought to mean, people who really dig vampires, but it actually refers to fans of fictional stories about vampires. Victims ought to mean victims of vampires, people whose blood was drunk. In this book, it refers to pyrophoria victims, who were demonized as vampires by the press after a professor named Dolphin hypothosized that pyrophoria patients were the truth behind the legend of vampires, which in fact, fact painstakingly laid out here, is false. These are interesting, but not the fasnicating content suggested by the title. Good marketing is not necessarily condusive to helping me choose good books. This book emphasizes the manner in which the American people view vampires. It tries, over and over, to convice the reader that the topic is something else. But the topic is a proof, repeated often, that Americans have a definite fixation with vampires, that vampires are part of American culture. Dresser's insistance that Americans are attracted to vampires is extremely emphatic, and it appears even more emphatic than it is because there is nobody claiming that vampires are not a part of American culture. Or if anyone is of that opinion, he's not cited here.
Happy reading.
