Gentle reader, you know how sometimes you get a thought in your head and while you know it is not possible nor feasible the thought stays in your head, tantalizing you ever so slyly because you want to believe it’s possible and feasible?
I really, really, ever so much want Abraham Lincoln to be a vampire hunter.
There, I’ve said it. And, just for the record, I want our 16th president to be a slayer of vampires just like Seth Grahame-Smith protrayed in his book Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
(I’m pretty sure at least one of you are dialing 1-8oo-find-your-friend-a-psychiatrist right about now. But try not to stress about my mental state too much. I certainly don’t.)
I cannot rave enough about Grahame-Smith’s novel. Was it a perfect book? No, of course not. But it was perfectly entertaining. And that is worth quite a bit in my estimation.
Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is written as a grandly epic biography, seamlessly weaving Lincoln’s actual life story with fantastical supernatural elements. In the novel Abraham Lincoln’s mother dies at the hand of vampires, thus earning the eternal hatred of the future president. What follows is Lincoln’s gripping story of revenge that propels him to fight against slavery and eventually run for President of the United States.
While the book is a tad bit gruesome (Lincoln evidently used his axe for things other than splitting fence rails if you catch my drift) I don’t think that the story is overly gory because the vampire hunt is not the focus, the man behind it is.
(I will warn you that my children found the front and back hardcover to be grimly fascinating. My son kept saying, “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to read that thing!” while I kept assuaging my parental guilt over exposing him to such scenes by weakly rationalizing “Well….at least it inspires him to read.” If you’re worried, rest assured that the paperback cover is much more tame.)
Do you need more persuading to pick up this book? My husband stayed up until 4:30 a.m. one night just so that he could finish it. I can give no higher praise than that.
My husband read the 700-page book Team of Rivals in preparation for reading this book. (Seriously. He thought it would be unjust to read a novel about Lincoln before reading a biography about him. I have no such qualms, so I will be reading this soon, without my husband’s self-imposed prereq.) I’m excited.
I want to read the 700 page book now to see how accurate the vampire biography is. Only because the vampire book is so well written and because I kept asking my husband about a hundred times “Did Lincoln really….”