Four score and seven years ago....

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith

           The book begins with the Seth Grahame-Smith, the book’s author (and author of the popular Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) being offered the chance to read the long-lost personal journals of President Abraham Lincoln on the condition that he writes a book about the diary’s subject-matter: Lincoln’s secret life as a vampire hunter.

Using the long-lost diaries, Grahame-Smith’s book shows that Lincoln began hunting vampires as a young man after learning that he himself lost a family member in a vampire attack.  This is not so much the Lincoln who wanted to save the Union or end the abomination of slavery…this Lincoln’s most sincere desire is “to kill every vampire in America.”   
   

And to be honest I kind of like that premise.  Granted, it is a little bizarre (ok…very bizarre), but the idea of one of America’s greatest heroes having a secret-double life as a vampire hunter was too good to pass up (and also put the theme to Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my head while walking out of the library.)

            The book takes some liberties with the traditional vampire lore (though thankfully the vampires don’t sparkle like diamonds in the sun).  And the way the book weaves the threads and comparison’s between vampirism, slavery, and the civil war is something I really found quite cleaver.

However, for a book supposed to have used a long-lost series of diaries of the main character, Lincoln seems at times less dynamic than his marble statue sitting in Washington.   Apart from his early vampire exploits, the book seems scarcely to mention his family or the rest of his life but in passing, using the excuse that Lincoln used his diaries more as a chronicle of his vampire-hunting exploits than on daily encounters of family life.  However, if the author is going to go out of the way to create a long-lost diary can’t they have had it continue something more about his family life?  And you’d think that writing a book from a “long lost diary” the main character would be a bit more dynamic?

            What may be more irksome in Grahame-Smith’s tale is that Lincoln seems more of a puppet than a great man.  He early on is befriended by a sort-of mentor who  uses Lincoln for various tasks.   It felt as if Lincoln rarely seems to act on his own much (especially with regard to vampires) without word from his mentor.  After a while it felt like Lincoln was just standing there for most of the book, not really doing much of anything on his own that isn’t somehow set about by another character. Even the famous “House Divided” speech idea appears to come from another character and not be of Lincolns thinking, rendering an interesting twist on that bit of history.    

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…except for vampires…

            The book also suffers from the occasionally photoshopped image.  I can see how Grahmane-Smith was trying to be cute/funny (like one showing a painting of young Lincoln with axe lording over a field of dead vampires he killed instead of logs he split).  It’s an interesting idea, but after a while it became distracting and not supplementing the narrative.  The quoted diary entries often felt more like they were written in modern vernacular than that of Lincoln’s time.  Plus, why is there a character who has been living in North America for centuries, but has never lost his English accent?  Isn’t that just a bit…odd?

            Overall, I liked the book to a point, though the ending chapters seemed more bare-bones than fully developed and the ending of the book itself was disappointing, opening up many more questions than answers.  It wasn’t terrible, but it still felt rushed, as if trying to ride the wave of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’s popularity.  Had I liked the ending more, this would have been much higher.

Rating: 2.5 of 5.