Saturday 26 March 2011

Honest Abe v. The Undead

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Ring any bells? Well, it's a new book and I've just received an unsolicited review copy. So - being an honest sort of chap - I will read it and report back on what I find. However, from the blurb and review extracts it seems that this is an erudite and somewhat tongue-in-cheek remixing of US history. With vampires. (If nobody has yet written Moby Dick and Cthulhu, can I humbly suggest it?)

To digress slightly, when did books start having trailers? I mean, it's weird. Not wrong, just odd.



What are we to make of all this, though, as a social trend? Well, I'll have more to say on this matter later. Possibly. At the moment it seems to be part of a wider trend towards traditional storytelling, whereby historical characters were always 'mashed up' - thus to mediaeval writer King David of Israel and Alexander the Great would be parfit gentle Christian knights. We may have Wikipedia for research, but the principle is not dissimilar.

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