Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter
by Seth Grahame-Smith
★★★★☆
Indiana, 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness."
"My baby boy..." she whispers before dying.
Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire.
When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln, he writes in his journal, "henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose..." Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House.
While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years.
Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.
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I liked this even better than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Because it wasn't a mash-up. It's an alternative history, my first.
I'm certainly no Lincoln aficionado, but having been to all of the important sites relevant to his life: Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and even the fatal Ford Theatre, I felt like I was in on some secret. I was able to imagine this version of history actually taking place in those locations.
I found several reviews by people who railed on the author for belittling the impact that slavery had on our country by making it "a mere contrivance of vampires". Uhhh... no. I don't think that's it at all. Grahame-Smith doesn't poo-poo slavery and its effect on our nation. He deals with it from Lincoln's perspective. Lincoln didn't own slaves. He was taught by his father to abhor the idea. I don't know about his real history, but in this book, when he encounters slaves and vampires, it's not treated lightly. The description of events is horrific and grotesque--and not in an ironic or humorous way but in a very serious way.
And lest everyone forget, the Civil War wasn't entirely about slavery. It was about secession from the Union that came about because of the polarizing debate on the morality of slavery.
But you have to remember, THIS IS FICTION! Though it is written in an autobiographical style, and contains numerous real (though altered) photographs and diary entries, it is still fiction. You can't get mad at the author for not documenting historical events with 100% accuracy. And so what if his primary source of information was Wikipedia? Was he supposed to do a complete study on Lincoln before writing this in order to make sure that every fact lined up, with the exception of the addition of vampires to events. Please. If you're treating this as your history book, then you're in trouble. Fiction, people.
That said, I thought the ending seemed rather out of character.
**SPOILER ALERT**
I mean, I think the ending didn't match up with Lincoln's character as he had been written throughout the book. With each death of a family member, Henry asks Abe if he'd like for him to do what was necessary to bring the deceased back to life. And each time, Lincoln declines vehemently. He spent his life fighting against vampires, or at least the bad ones. And even the "good ones" he found repulsive because of the way he knew they must feed. So WHY ON EARTH would he become one? Henry took it upon himself to resurrect Lincoln so that he could, what, fight against Hitler and try to save Martin Luther King Jr.? I thought that Lincoln would rather take his own life than become one of the creatures he had fought so hard against. It just didn't make sense to me. I felt like the book had "jumped the shark" at that point. Thankfully, only a scant few pages remained.