Sunday, March 06, 2011
Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter
I just watched a video of a group of young adults sitting around a table at a diner after church, singing "Happy Birthday." As he blew out the candles on the cake, Johnny had a cellphone pressed to his ear & wasn't even making direct eye-contact with his friends. How rude can you get? At least he was smiling. I took an instant dislike to him. Somebody should have grabbed the phone, stuck it in the cake, then handed it back to him.
***
Disppointed in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith. The first half of the fanged goth-history book would make a good graphic novel; it had some funny, gory passages & the development of Lincoln as an expert vampire hunter fit well with his early life, the deaths of his mother & brother, his time in New Salem, his flatboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans, & first years as a lawyer & politician in Springfield.
Then the novel exposed secession & the Civil Was as a vast plot by racist vampires to guarantee themselves a reliable supply of slaves &, if necessary, poor whites, for blood-drinking, & as financiers & masters of their living, non-vampire Rebel leaders like Jefferson Davis. Slavery was real & horrible enough without pushing blame off on a vampire conspiracy, & making the conspiracy a focus of Abe's determination to win the war. It felt like an injustice to the truth, & was not humorous.
Although Robert E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson wrongly put their sense of Christian duty in the service of a slave empire, I could not imagine them extending this duty to vampires. I think that's where they would have drawn the line. Unless they were vampires, too.
***
Disppointed in Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith. The first half of the fanged goth-history book would make a good graphic novel; it had some funny, gory passages & the development of Lincoln as an expert vampire hunter fit well with his early life, the deaths of his mother & brother, his time in New Salem, his flatboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans, & first years as a lawyer & politician in Springfield.
Then the novel exposed secession & the Civil Was as a vast plot by racist vampires to guarantee themselves a reliable supply of slaves &, if necessary, poor whites, for blood-drinking, & as financiers & masters of their living, non-vampire Rebel leaders like Jefferson Davis. Slavery was real & horrible enough without pushing blame off on a vampire conspiracy, & making the conspiracy a focus of Abe's determination to win the war. It felt like an injustice to the truth, & was not humorous.
Although Robert E. Lee & Stonewall Jackson wrongly put their sense of Christian duty in the service of a slave empire, I could not imagine them extending this duty to vampires. I think that's where they would have drawn the line. Unless they were vampires, too.
Labels: what I'm reading
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is to literature as Battleship: The Movie is to cinema. Its entire essence is contained in the pitch that sold it: "He's Abraham Lincoln. And he fights vampires!" It's a meme, not art.
# posted by 
: 9:03 PM
: 9:03 PM
I don't know nothin' about literature & cinema. I happen to like Janet Evanovich's slapstick Stephanie Plummer novels, which take take in a Trenton where the gang violence is almost laughable. A world created has to be true to itself (it's how we judge sci-fi), & Lincoln: Vampire Hunter stumbled badly in that regard.
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