Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - or why I'd rather read Anita Blake
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I liked the idea of this book, so why oh why did i stop at page 59 and swear never again would it darken my eyes
one. I like biography so the idea of a pseudo biography didn't bother me, however a badly written one did
two. i have read many vampire books most of which have evil bitey ones not the sexually frustrated ones and so that didn't warm the cockles of my dark heart
three. the editting in this book is atrocious, painfully painfully bad, it switches from first to third person with no warning whatsoever leaving me in a confused and befuddled state going WTF! now I am erudite and know how to frame a quote, but seriously, even quotation marks would have been better, there was absolutely no reason or rhyme whatsoever of why it went third person/first person like a rather confused narrator with multiple personality disorder. I understand that he was trying to quote the diary but TELL me that! quotation marks will do, although technically you should indent, italicise and highlight where these quotes are from even if it's just a note to a footnote, the reason for this is simple - it lets the reader KNOW that you're quoting.
It was like a being on a whirligig and for the first couple of times i thought it was me, but no! it was this book
I am a voracious reader, I devour books and grew up on vampire novels so that intrigued, however I did read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and discovered the only bits I liked were the Pride and Prejudice bits which I'd read before, so I should have been prewarned that Mr Grahame-Smith has brilliant ideas but his prose is awful, so why did i pick up this book, well it was in the bathroom, i didn't have to pay for it - but still, page 59! maybe it got better, maybe the story is unputdownable brilliant, but the switchy nature of the narrator gave me a headache. Life is too short to want to go over a book with a highlighter just to make it easier to read.
if for some reason you want to read this book - don't bother, read Kim Newman's Anno Dracula instead, it is a very similar idea (much older) and much better! or Tom Holland's "Vampyre" all of which feature vampires that will happily eat your face based in a real historical landscape, not this pseudo-biographical nonsense that appears to have been written by a flotilla of monkeys that Mr Grahame-smith has chained to typewriters in his basement!
yes i was that mortally offended by the narrator switches, it only lacked "you are in a darkened room..." second person to finish the set.
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