Sonoma State Star > Arts & Entertainment
Lincoln slays vampires
Published: Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Updated: Tuesday, April 20, 2010 23:04
Seth Grahame-Smith's "Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter" is a misleading fictional novel centered on the life of the United State's sixteenth president. This tale is more creative than blasphemous; it is another work from the same man who authored "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." This 336 page novel attributes all of Lincoln's sorrows and drives to immortal souls of the night.
From its introduction to the very end, "Hunters" eerily and convincingly makes the existence of vampires, fact. The author establishes the fiction that a collection of 10 personal diaries of the Civil War president holds the truth behind every major obstacle surrounding his life. This obstacle being: the vampire race. With his witty introduction, written with confidence and authority, Grahame-Smith is able to reinvent a biography on one of history's most influential icons.
The novel begins Lincoln's relationship with vampires as an obsession driven by fierce retribution. Still in his youth, a vampire killed his mother. Immediately, vampires are the enemy, the ones behind all of Lincoln's woes and the ones threatening the harmony of human existence. From the time of his mother's death, Grahame-Smith alleges that Lincoln wrote: "I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America."
The events described throughout the novel incorporate fantastical happenings into a seemingly biographical narrative. Lincoln is depicted as a heroic and quite successful man of intense conviction, not unlike his current and legendary reputation. According to this novel, however, this conviction is fueled primarily by vampire hatred. In this way, this ‘biography' is somewhat unconventional.
Grahame-Smith succeeds in weaving fantasy and fiction. His fictional accounts are seamlessly carved into the real life of the president. The author speaks of Lincoln's humble beginnings, his romances, his faults, his intellect, his careers, his struggles, his life. These facts, many true, include the notion that Lincoln lived to see vampires die.
The reader is taken through the evolution of a child to a president. This life span change is so relatable; Grahame-Smith paints the president inside the portrait of a very regular man dealing with the circumstances of life. Vampires are accepted by the reader in this fantasy as a large influence in Lincoln's life. The author is careful to explain each of Lincoln's convictions in the vampire infused story.
Subsequent deaths that populate this man's life are blamed on vampires. The novel, however, is not a simple story of monster vs. man. Grahame-Smith has made it much more complicated than that. The intellect of the novel lies in the character Henry Sturges, a vampire who is uncommonly loyal and protective of its mortal counterparts.
Sturges provides the novel's point of debate, a debate centered around his recurring motto to Lincoln: "Judge us not equally." This profound statement leads Lincoln as well as the reader to focus on the individual, not the group.
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