Book Review - Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Grahame-Smith

I have just finished reading the oddly enjoyable Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, by Seth Graham-Smith. It is the first novel of his I have read, although I have certainly heard of his other works.

The novel is written with a biographer's dispassion, summarizing the defining episodes of Mr. Lincoln's life, based on a series of well-repressed journals that Lincoln penned throughout his life, as well as on interviews that the narrator conducted with several unnamed people - who, I suspect, are vampires.

What follows is a nearly seamless blending of American history and dark, gothic fantasy. It is at once a brilliant satire on revisionist history, a wonderful tale of mythological creatures, and a subtle set of jabs at what we think we know about our beloved 16th president. Lincoln is, after all one of the most controversial presidents in our history. He led an attack against what was essentially one half of his own country; he was the first president to be born in poverty, with very little formal education; he was the first president to be successfully assassinated; and in spite of the fact that more books have been written about him than about any other president of this country, he remains today a subject of debate, inspiring authors even today to raise new questions about him, attacking his supposed rational for trying to "preserve the union." There is even a webpage - and I apologize in advance for bringing this up - that questions the existence of Abraham Lincoln:

http://www.reasonsforgod.org/2013/03/did-abraham-lincoln-exist/

But, enough about that. What about the vampires?

Lincoln's hatred of vampires began with an event that took place before his very conception: his father, Thomas Lincoln, witnessed his own father, Abraham Lincoln Sr., being brutally murdered by a vampire. Thomas Lincoln tells young Abe of this terrible day, and then Abe watches in horror as Thomas Lincoln suffers at the hands of another vampire who demands redress (Shylock-style) for a loan which Thomas failed to pay back. Abe makes a wooden stake, confronts the vampire, and stabs him through the heart. But Abe's thirst for vengeance is not quenched, and so he sets off on a journey to rid the country of vampires - only to find that this mission is far more difficult than he would ever have imagined. Abe (thus the author refers to Mr. Lincoln throughout the book) eventually finds help, from the most unlikely source: another vampire.

Henry Sturges, vampire and 16th-century Englishman, claims to be the only survivor of the doomed Roanoke Colony. He carefully advises Abe that some vampires prefer to be left alone and to do as little damage to society as possible, while other vampires crave dominance over the human race. "Judge us not equally," he tells Abe; "We may all deserve hell, but some of us deserve it sooner than others." After this life-changing encounter, Abe begins to receive letters from Henry, instructing Abe to hunt down certain vampires who threaten innocent citizens of this country. These letters increase in number, and this crescendo is paralleled by another crescendo, that of slavery spreading and gaining political justification (as with the Dredd Scott Case, which is mentioned briefly).

Eventually the two issues meet, in a revelation that is at once horrifying and strangely logical: the vampires are in league with the southern confederates. Vampires are planning to take over the country, and the southern slaveholders have agreed to help them in return for a few positions of power in the new undead regime (actually, I do not think Grahame-Smith ever gives a name to the supposed new country that the vampires wish to create; perhaps it would just continue to be called the U.S.A., and other people around the world would come to think of "America" as synonymous with "Vampire"). The vampires like the slaveholders, because the partnership gives them first dibs on the flesh of slaves. Thus, it is with the help of super-powerful "vampire soldiers" that the South successfully fends off Lincoln's armies for four blood years.

Now, I can see a problem here. So easily we can come to the conclusion that we might already be seeking: here's the proof that the Confederate States of America was evil. They were allied with vampires! Aha, I knew it! Those damned slaveholders had a deal with the devil, right there, it's finally just black and white. Yes, it's very easy to say that about a lot of things. Maybe it would be better to think of all southerners as people who are bedfellows with vampires. Swap "southerners" with "Jews," and you would more or less have what a certain Austrian said eighty years ago. The book approaches this idea of absolutism, but does not carry it through entirely, and this ambiguity is one of the book's finest qualities. "Judge us not equally," Henry's refrain goes. There are shades of grey in the humans of the story, just as there are shades of grey in the vampires. Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln's rival, eventually comes to support Abe. Jefferson Davis is portrayed as a vile man, but also as a victim of supernatural creatures who give him very few options.

Whatever its messages, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a splendid novel. It is fast-paced, brilliantly researched, and includes many early "daguerreotypes" that show the dark-eyed vampires lurking in the midst of our history. I do not think there is much didactic intent in the novel. The vampires are not models of virtue, nor are they evil incarnate. They are simply higher forms of life (or "un-death"), making attempts here and there to interfere with human society for their own gain. Abe's rashness to kill the vampires gets him in trouble more than once. Toward the end of the novel there is heartbreaking scene. Abe, having just lost his youngest son to a poison administered by a vampiric assassin, admits an apologetic Henry Sturges to his office. Yet anything Henry says will only incense Abe more, reminding Abe of how vampires, whether southern or abolitionist, have taken over his life and turned it into a waking death. Abe grabs his axe and tries to kill Henry, and Henry takes the icon and snaps it in two. When a man has lost so many things that used to define him, what is left? Where does the man begin and his surroundings end? When Abe resolved to spend his life destroying vampires, did his life become a force of destruction, dooming any possibility of peace for the man?

Because that image of destruction, however fantastical, epitomizes Lincoln's plight when he became president. In order to keep his country, he had to attack it. Can this plan of action ever be truly justified? The killing of approximately one million American people, just so that a few more million people could be free? If southern slaveholders were so narrow-minded as to enslave their fellow man, then why did Lincoln want so badly to keep them a part of his own country? Might we have been better off without them? Most of the countries in Europe had already abolished slavery by the 1860s; I'm sure the Confederate States would have freed them eventually, though every day of slavery was another day of godlessness.

I think Grahame-Smith's reason for choosing Lincoln as his novel's vampire hunter (as opposed to, say, Jack Kennedy, or Alexander Hamilton, or Cab Calloway, or Regis Philbin), was to show that resolution is simply a part of life. We have to make decisions sometimes. Lincoln made a great and terrible decision when he chose to wage the Civil War. Grahame-Smith focuses on that decision, enhances and exaggerates it, when he portrays Lincoln as a man who has accepted a double-life. I think that, in a way, Abraham Lincoln was the 19th-century Peter Parker, pushing himself to do more than one man would ever be expected to do, while still trying to lead a normal life. No one will ever know if he did the right thing, but one thing is certain: he will never be forgotten.

Judge us not equally. Because how can we ever be sure who a person really is?

Librarian Horror Movie Trailer

Well, someone had to do it.

"Psycho" - A Review

Halloween is over, and I recently revisited an old classic, Psycho. Here is a brief recounting of what I think of it.

Psycho is, first of all, a flawed film. The plot is disjointed; the pace is uneven; the characters are few in number, and there is not a great range of emotions. The story consists of two separate plots that have very little to do with each other. It begins with Marion Crane stealing forty thousand dollars; it ends with a total fixation on the deranged psychology of Norman Bates, and the forty thousand dollars is as good as forgotten. There is the vague hint that Bates and Marion are two parts of the same person, a plot point that I will discuss later, but the connection is weak and underdeveloped (it might have been better explored if Marion had survived longer than thirty minutes into the movie).

Yet the movie is, undeniably, a masterpiece. Like Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, or Ridley Scott’s Alien, it is a unique and original work whose uncanny power overwhelms its flaws and captivates audiences long since the work was first released. It is a movie of extremes: a woman suddenly decides to steal a great sum of money from a company that has employed her and trusted her for years; a man is suddenly drawn toward a woman he has just met; a third person(ality?) exacts revenge on that same woman within the hour. It is a movie about desperation, and panic, and hasty decisions – leaving a terrible mess that other, more ordinary people must unravel and clean up.

On the surface level, Marion’s decision to stay at the Bates Motel is horribly convenient for Hitchcock, a cheap parlor trick that we have seen too many times before and since. A weary traveler must spend the night somewhere, and she just happens to wind up at what is essentially a haunted house. Out of all the motels on the road, she just happened to pick the one run by a matricidal recluse – and out of all the attractive women to stay at his motel, Bates just happens to receive a visit from a woman who has just stolen forty thousand dollars. If he is so easily set off by an intriguing visitor, why has no one ever died at his motel before?

How does this improbable plot point work? Simple – because the movie is not meant to be logical. As Dr. Richmond says later, “These were crimes of passion, not profit.” Or, as Roger Ebert once remarked in his review of The Game, “The events are believable in the sense that events can be believed in a nightmare.” The infamous shower scene draws its power, not from any special relationship between a shower and the rest of the story, but simply because a shower is the last place where you would want someone sneaking up on you. It is the most private part of a house or apartment, and when Marion is stabbed there, the audience realizes that this murderer, whoever he or she is, will go farther and across more boundaries than any other murderer we might have been expecting. The fear in that scene is timeless and translates across any culture.

Of course, after that scene, we have the tedious set of scenes in which Norman discovers the body and must get rid of all evidence. He is horrified, but does not faint or vomit, and we know this is not the first corpse he has dealt with. His efforts to clean up all traces of Crane culminate in the ludicrous scene in which he pushes her car into the swamp and watches it slowly descend, inch by inch. There is a moment when the car stops sinking but is still visible, and we imagine for a moment that Bates is going to pull the car out and find a bigger swamp in which to sink the car, or perhaps pull out a garden hose and spray this swamp until the water is a little deeper. But the car sinks in, and we never see Marion Crane or the forty thousand dollars again. The screen is then dominated by Lila Crane, a character we have never seen for the first third of the movie.

The rest of the movie plays out like a detective story, in which the audience already knows the where and the how, though not quite the who and the why. But it is still not a typical detective story, as symbolized by the fact that the detective (Arbogast) is killed after perhaps ten minutes of screen time.

The line “We all go a little mad sometimes,” has been immortalized, but it is followed by a rhetorical question from Bates: “Haven’t you?” To which Marion Crane responds, “Yes. Sometimes just one time can be enough.” At this point we realize that Marion, after her sudden impulse to steal, is contemplating her future. Does she want to spend the rest of her life on the run? Meeting Norman Bates makes her realize that she has trapped herself in a terrible predicament, and suddenly she has the will to extricate herself. But just as she is planning to return the money (or what is left of it), she dies at the hands of someone even more insane than she is. When she made that terrible decision to steal, her life turned into a nightmare, and in a sense Norman Bates is the conclusion of that nightmare. His insanity is an extension of her own, almost as if the Bates Motel was drawn into existence by Marion herself. The dead mother, the man in the wig, the shadowy figure with his knife – none of these things could exist except in a world in which Marion Crane suddenly decides to steal forty thousand dollars. The money itself becomes irrelevant, but the act of stealing is like a drop in a pond, creating more and more ripples, a catalyst that brings about a world of trouble. Our feeling of Marion’s distress over stealing the money becomes our feeling of Norman’s distress when he discovers the dead body. This is a movie is about the unpredictable nature of insanity itself.

At the end we have another oddly paced scene, in which the psychiatrist calmly explains Norman’s condition, as if it were a textbook example and Lila Crane attending him only because she is pursuing a master’s degree in criminology. His tone is casual, detached, almost amused, as if this whole story is so absurd that it cannot be taken seriously and perhaps never even happened (ironically, the story is in fact based on true events). The psychiatrist has not lost someone dear, as Lila has; he did not see the corpse in the fruit cellar; he certainly did not get stabbed in the shower. The events of this movie cannot be explained to any significant effect, because they simply do not make much sense; they must be experienced.

This movie was directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960, after Hitchcock decided that Jimmy Stewart was too old to play heroes in Hitchcock movies anymore (apparently the act of aging went against a clause in Mr. Stewart’s contract). It is a movie about two people who choose to push themselves to their limits, and the consequences that follow. The unexplored limits of our existences will always terrify us, and Janet Leigh took baths rather than showers to the end of her life.