When I was in college, I wrote several papers about vampires and loved every bit of it. I'm still very much a vampire fan and I was excited for the opportunity to read more about them from a more academic point of view.

Would I recommend this book. Yes. Definitely.

My biggest concern is the corpus the author chose to work with. She admits herself that she focused on stuff she enjoyed, but that means other relevant pieces of media were discarded and that could lead to a little bit of bias. I was also concerned about the fact that there is no research book listed in the bibliography.

Other than that, I thought this book mentioned a lot of very interesting topics, though some of them could have used a deeper analysis. I'll definitely remember the part about Countess Bathory being a victim of sexism. I'm a bit sad that she didn't go further and explained how sexism is still very much present in modern representations of women in vampire books, like Dracula's poor Lucy Westenra being raped and called a willing prostiture for it while Mina Harker is the pure woman to be protected at all costs. There's definitely something here and should anyone want to write about sexism in vampire books would find a couple of examples in this book.

Other fascinating topics include the torment of eternal life, far from the gift it looks like at first. Vampire children illustrate that point perfectly, from Interview with a Vampire's Claudia's rage at not growing up to Let The Right One In's Eli, stuck in the body of a mutilated child and living with a paedophile. Dissociating eternal life from eternal youth is another great point. Sexuality and consent in a good chapter as well, though I find it hard to talk about vampiric sexuality with so little emphasis on homosexuality. The same remark could be said about vampires and morality, which delves way too quickly into "vegetarian" diet and never mentions True Blood or the ersatz being developped by Daybreakers' main character (this movie isn't great but it does have something to say about vegetarian vampires. Vampires moving from ports to suburbs could have been a great introduction to talk about how vampirism can be a methaphor for racism. And the chapter about music could have mentioned Marilyn Manson's If I was your Vampire or Alice Cooper's cameo in Dark Shadows.

I'm also sad that blood disease, which is a known vampire weakness, especially these days, doesn't even get a mention. From AIDS in True Blood to tainted blood in Only Lovers Left Alive to vampiric blood in Daybreakers (told you this movie was relevant!), vampires can no longer eat whoever they want to the point where blood can actually be used as a weapon, like for Claudia in Interview with the Vampire.

Now I insist: I did enjoy the book. The topics are rather wide and all are interesting and the author sounds like someone I would LOVE to have a conversation with on the subject. I never get the chance to discuss vampires this way and it was so great to get back into it like this. Now would I recommend this book as as research ressource? Actually yes, I would. I could definitely see it in a bibliography for a thesis. Hell, I wish it had been around when I wrote mine. Just expect some additional work to do to dig deeper. And if you want to read it just because you enjoy vampires? Yes. But I would suggest checking the bibliography and filmography first so you can understand the references better.

This book is so well written!!! I really enjoyed it and I think it is quite a fun book to everybody who loves vampires and want to know more on how they are portrayed.
I think it would also be great if we had pictures or illustrations along the book, because sometimes it was a bit heavy.

First off I want to say a huge thank you to the publisher Pen and Sword History, the author Violet Fenn , and to NetGalley for letting request it as well as for letting me read and review it and I'm so glade that I did because it was a great read for those who love reading anything that deals with vampires just like me , this book is also perfect for those who love to watch vampire movies which is other thing I love, and I give points to the author for putting this together. Because not only do you learn of vampire history, but you also get to learn abut their origins in mythology and literature and their enduring appeal on television and films and vampire lore . But the biggest win for me was the references she made to books and movies , some I knew and others I didn't , and after reading this I want to go and watch some of the movies she named which is great because I love old moves and those are the ones I might end up watching like Dracula ( which not only one of my all time favorite books but movie as well )

I enjoyed A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture well enough, but not throughout the whole book. The author sometimes goes a bit off topic, talking about other horror characters, ie: Frankenstein.

While I did learn some interesting stuff, I also found it lacking in depth. The author would start on a paragraph and end it with one word or a phrase then go onto a new subject or gloss over something with no detailed explanation.

Thank you Netgalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

“A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture“ by Violet Fenn [4/5]

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the review copy

This is a non-fiction book about vampires. And I think it is a very entertaining one. Non-fiction books are really tough to review for me because I do not think a lot of us would be able to spot mistakes or inaccuracies. So please, bear with me.

I want to say I read this book at exactly the right time. I came into this book having bing-watched the three episodes of BBC and Netflix's Dracula mini-series (which I really love) and Fenn references this series throughout. I get the feeling she liked it a lot too (and it is one of the most recent adaption of Dracula). Though I think she might have misquoted the series one time, early in the book but I am not entirely sure. I was very happy that Fenn decided to not only write about the vampire stories people always tend to write about but also used depictions that are not as well known side by side to the very popular series and movies. You do not need to know all of them because she describes most of the series she discusses. Some might argue that important vampire depictions are missing in this book but I would say she finds the right mix between historical depiction, more modern ones and how the vampire depictions developed throughout the ages.

It is also written in a more informal tone so if you are looking for highly academic research on vampires in popular culture you will not find it in this book. Don't get me wrong, she explains everything really way and uses a lot of examples for what she wants to say, but Fenn's tone is more colloquial than academic and I think this makes the book a lot easier and more fun to read (because I know not everyone enjoys non-fiction of the more academic nature).

If you already know a lot about the history of vampires in popular culture you might already know a lot of the things Fenn mentions in her book. But if you are new to the topic and are interested in it I would recommend picking up this book as it serves as a good introduction.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. It is probably not suitable for true students of the subject as it is definitely not an academic treatment. The book would have benefitted from better editing -- I did spot a number of typo-style errors and spelling and grammatical mistakes. I also would have recommended a more cohesive structure. To be honest the book read like a series of blog posts with not much effort to bridge them together. That said, it was a very interesting and entertaining series of blog posts, especially for a casual reader such as myself. I particularly appreciated the timeline at the end.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC copy for my review.

A book about the popular culture in vampire lore certainly needs ruthless research and collation even if the author specifically focuses on the Western vampiric canon. The first chapter is similar to other books I have read about the history of the vampire and is a nice refresher. The author gives her personal touch to the prose. After that, the book falls short of my expectations. Ana Lily Amirpour's critically acclaimed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Park Chan-wook's Thirst (2009) never make the cut. Neither do books like The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot (a philosophical vampire treatise) and Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin (the man should be appreciated for more than just Game of Thrones) make an appearance. And these are just four examples most vampire/supernatural/horror enthusiast are aware of. There is a whole rabbit hole of Victorian, noir, retro vampire fiction and slasher movies that I am not going to talk about here. I am afraid despite having read the Twilight series (as an omnivore vampire lore reader) I find it hard to give positive ratings to a nonfiction book on vampire where Meyer's work is more than overrepresented. The research work is shoddy at best.

This book is a fun easy read a dive into Vampires in popular culture.With lots of good stories from history. The authors obviously dislike off twilight is throughout 😂.I have a whole heap of book and movies to read and watch from the references made in book all listed at the end.

A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture is just that - it explores the history and origin of the vampire and how the rules of the creature of changed. The book looks into vampires of specific movies and tv shows and even comic book and songs. Highly recommended to anyone who is interested in vampires.

The subject matter of this book is absolutely in my wheelhouse, so you can imagine how excited I was to read this. And how sad I am to give it such a low score. Firstly, it needs major editing. There are run-on sentences galore, dependent clauses modifying subjects incorrectly, and the occasional odd word choice. The author also names Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as Godstone. Not once, but multiple times. Was this an instance of bad auto correcting?

As for the history, most of it is already old hat to anyone interested in vampires and goth subculture. Very little new info is to be found. The discussion of different vampire media is choppy and reads more like a hackneyed encyclopedia of movie summaries with some thoughts in why humans love vampires so much. There are random, sometimes snarky parenthetical asides that offer little to the discussion. I feel as though I just read a paper by a moderately clever fifteen year-old, not a fifty year-old author.

The best part, the most relevant to our interests, was the final interview chapter with different, relevant people, either involved in the goth lifestyle or involved in pertinent media. I think the author interviewed Dacre Stoker, but somehow forget to inform the reader when the voice of the interviewee abruptly changed.

This needs heavy editing before its published.

This looked like an interesting read. I enjoyed learning about how vampires have been presented throughout history, and I particularly liked learning about the different myths and superstitions that people used to have.
My one criticism is that the amount of summary for some movies or texts seemed to outweigh the analyses. Even though I wasn’t familiar with some of the movies described, I felt like there was too much summary.

This was a thorough look at vampires in western tradition. Though the author admits she doesn't know enough about other versions of vampire folklore, I would definitely be interested if she decided to tackle that at a later date. Overall, this book was well thought out and pulled examples from a wide range of stories.

You only get a few pages into this book before you realize that Violet Fenn is not an academic historian nor is she used to writing long-form non-fiction. The book is disorganized and choppy and difficult to read. It sticks to North American and European popular culture and ignores all of the hungry Asian vamps of film and fiction of which there are oodles. The scholarship is shallow.

This book feels like a bunch of blog posts strung together. The chronology is erratic and when the same topic, like about Buffy for example, comes up in a different setting, some of the text is awfully similar. In the ARC, at least, there is not much warning when topics change. I hope that a graphic designer has helped with the final edition.

I don't really think you will get much from this book.

Dracula has been around for over 200 years (or close to 1000 if you count the stories and legends), beginning with written publications by Lord George Gordon Byron (The Giaour) and John William Polidori (The Vampyre). Through the years the vampire legends have grown and become a part of our pop culture, and many of us have embraced them and hungered for more.

Author Violet Fenn leads us on a tour through the years, recounting the earlier tales when science played little part in the things that went bump in the night, including the periods when even newspapers would report the unexplainable as fact. As civilization evolved the tales found new ways to spread, reaching out into movies, television, and song.

Some may feel that the book rambles at times, running back and forth across the centuries. With a subject like this, though, there could be so much content that the book could easily double in size. Rather than producing a bloated and potentially boring collection of chronological facts, Ms. Fenn has separated the book into different themes. Chapters titled “Dead Sexy,” “Vampire Next Door,” “Virtue and Vampires,” and “The Last Sunrise” each paint a picture and help prepare the reader for what’s coming. I liked that not only was the written word featured, but movies were touched on along with TV shows, poetry, pop songs, and comic books. Yes, comic books! The book also discusses our fascination with vampires, tastefully delving into the sexy aspect of vampires and conjecturing how close do we want to get (i.e., from holding vampires at arms-length to wondering if we want to be one?).

The back of the book contains an interesting chronology of items mentioned in the book, followed by a bibliography, a filmography, and an index. The author has also included an interesting assortment of pictures at the very end.

In the author’s own words, Dracula “…is all of us – our innermost desires and dreams and fears, pulled together and brought to life in an overwhelming mixture of terror and lust.” Ms. Fenn presents her subject with a touch of wit, sure to keep readers entertained. Four stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Pen & Sword for a complimentary electronic copy of this book.

A great, engaging account of historic note - I absolutely adored this book and it’s in depth look at vampires and how they came to be such a staple in pop culture! It’s also a beautifully book, gorgeous in any collection for your bookcase.

I love how the author also looked into sexism, and how dead bodies were misidentified as coming to life. It grounded the accounts told in the book. Overall, I would recommend this to horror and history fans of all types!

I want to thank Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC, I loved it and will be buying!

A rather enjoyable tribute to vampires and their history, in the real world and popular culture. I particularly enjoyed the "jazz vampires" chapter, mainly because I recognised many of the references and got introduced to a book series I'm excited to start on (Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London).

Despite having "vampire fatigue" after years of absorbing shows like True Blood and Buffy, and books like Queen of the Damned and Lestat, I'm still intrigued to discover variations and reimaginings by various authors. I've grown bored of Anne Rice's versions, but loved John Alvide Lindquists'. As the author suggested, maybe the definition of "vampires" shouldn't be limited to what Dracula or Nosferatu offered a long time ago. Like most things, it's always open to interpretation.

I glazed a little bit over some of the paragraphs, particularly the ones concerning everything Twilight, and it gets a bit repetitive with the overuse of Dracula as examples, but overall it's a fascinating dissection of the myth behind vampires and their ilk. Go on, it won't bite!!

I wanted so badly to love this book, and in places I absolutely did! I LOVED being human and it has really stuck with me over the years, so to discover another fan that really ‘gets it’, even through the page, was most welcome.
The author clearly is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about the subject matter, and I think that I would be interested in exploring this book again, but it needs to be thoroughly proof-read first. Some of the errors and continuity issues really let down the work.
I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t enjoy this book, because I really did. And the timeline and references at the end were very welcome as at various points I was thinking ‘a list of all these books, shows and movies would be great!’. So, thanks for reading my mind on that one, ha!
This book would be great as a great big coffee table book, packed full of images and quotes, or also as a documentary. I would gladly buy/watch either.

Thanks to the kind folks at #netgalley for the advance copy of this super interesting book ☺️

This was so up my street! I have loved Vampires ever since I was a child. I mean, who doesn't love a Vampire?
This book was brilliant! Not only did it look at some of the folklore, origins and rules about Vampires throughout the world and throughout the years. But, it also used specific popular culture references to explain various points about Vampires too. It looked at poetry, artwork, literature, films and music.
I learnt so much! Brilliantly written, and incredibly fascinating.

This book had so much potential... I was fascinated by the idea of analyzing the history of vampires and their depctions in popular culture, but it ended up being mostly the author's personal opinions on vampire stories. The author spends much of the book going through the plots of numerous shows, books, and movies featuring vampires. Just when you thought you were finally going to get an interesting, insightful analysis of how that specific tale related to human nature or society in general, it would end with one singular answer like "misogyny", "the patriarchy", "sexism", "racism", etc with absolutely no justification or explanation and would quickly move on to the next subject. As if the author had run out of time by telling us the plot and didn't have any time left to analyse it.

This book was at its best when it stuck to the real life history of vampires, folklore, "true stories" of vampires, etc. Unfortunately this was not the focus of the book and these parts are dragged down by the lengthy synopses of the movies, books, tv shows, etc.

The ideas in this book are spread pretty thin, seemingly in an effort for the author to fit so many different topics in and the book suffers for it. The author's passion for vampires is clear, but I wish they would've been more edited down so that the book didn't come across as disjointed.

This is not so much A History of the Vampire In Popular Culture as a History of Some Vampires In Popular Culture and a bit of a history of Goth culture too. I wonder if it started out as the former, as whilst there are some good historicalr bits about the birth of pop culture vampires here, there is also a lot of Goth. I am not sure an interview with Wayne Hussey of the The Mission is essential in a book about vampires at all but to have that there and no discussion of say, Near Dark, or any mention of Blacula feels weird.

In the intro Violet Fenn tells us a few things. Firstly the book will not be exhaustive, and any book like this will have to be selective. Secondly that she is a goth from the West Midlands and has been so inclined since her teenage years (that being Sisters Of Mercy, Mission wave of Goth, she is now fifty because even if not undead we are all living too long). And so her key vampries are Christopher Lee's Dracula, Gary Oldman and then a bit of Buffy through to the Gatiss/Moffatt Dracula. She doesn't like Twilight. She spends far too much time talking about Twilight. And whilst the book touches on all the main themes you would expect when talking about vampires (eroticism, immortality, transgressive sex), I do think the concentration on things you could have easily consumed in Britiain in the 21st century misses a lot out. So by all means include the vampire in Being Human, but what does a vampire represent when he is living with a werewolf and a ghost. You can suggest vampires don't work in comedy because Leslie Neilsen in Dracula Dead And Loving It was lousy, but does that cover the times Bela Lugosi played it for laughs. Talk about eroticism, particularly touch on The Hunger, but where is the denuded bondage of Underworld. In the end when she makes another good point to continually return to the same examples - particularly the 2019 BBC Dracula - feels slapdash.

This is a pity because there is little wrong with many of the arguments, and this is not an academic piece so perhaps just a cursory survey of the the vampire stuff you have probably seen is probably good enough. And with the exception of Let The Right One In, every example cited here is in English. So while its a solid read, it left me wanting a lot more, not least to re-title it to A History Of Goth And Some Vampires In English, Mainly From The Last Forty Years.