Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter

Seth Grahame-Smith

What do you do as an encore after writing a bestseller and trend setter like Pride and Prejudice and Zonbies ? Seth Graham-Smith has turned from Jane Austen to Abraham Lincoln.


The premise of the book is that Lincoln has been spending his nights, since the age of 12, when his mother was killed by a vampire, hunting and destroying the undead. Somehow nobody ever noticed all the corpses with wooden stakes through their hearts or their heads chopped off lying around Indiana, Illinois and up and down the Illinois, Ohio and Missippi rivers, all the way to New Orleans.

Vampires are also held responsible for slavery in the book. It seems that slave owners have been making a profit selling their excess, old and infirm or simply weak slaves to vampires for consumption. In fact some southern plantations are owned and occupied by vampires. You can tell them by the parasols and the dark glasses, which they wear to protect themselves from the sun. In this book vampires fought in the Confederate army and John Wilkes Booth was a vampire.

August is traditionally silly season and Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is a silly book. It is also well written and entertaining in it's own silly, if gruesome, way. Thanks to Graham-Smith, we now can enjoy titles like  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Zombies, The Undead World of Oz, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Mansfield Park and Mummies, Emma and the Werewolves and Android Karenina not to mention Zombie Economics, Zombie Capitalism. We have also been treated to op-ed pieces like All The President's Zombies, in the New York Times and Night of the Living Wonks in Foreign Policy (soon to be expanded into a book) When Will It Stop?