just to say the word vampire now is to make some readers shudder, and not for the right reasons. But reading a new study Erik Butlers The Rise of the Vampire we realise that what is interesting isnt just the vampires themselves but why they appear in the first place . . . Butler believes, amusingly, that if Twilights dark heart was properly understood, it would be banned from homes and schools everywhere. And hes right. In many unintended ways, the bloodless vampires on offer to teenagers right now are the scariest of all maybe not in themselves but in what they say about a world that sucks them up.
The Times
The author is to be congratulated on writing a shrewd and sometimes sardonic study on the origins of an ancient mystery, which in the past decade has been reduced to 50 shades of comic strip . . . For those with a taste for the supernatural, this is an excellent guidebook. Dracula probably would have enjoyed it.
The Washington Times
Mr. Butler is to be applauded for elucidating the emergence of vampire mythology in history and its progression through various cultures up to its widespread presence in todays culture. Weaving in themes of vampirism as cultural and psychological symptoms, amplifications of themes of life and its manifold limits and complexities, Erik Butler has created a masterful compendium of ideas.
New York Journal of Books
Butlers view of what constitutes a vampire is pleasingly broad . . . Butler does not only find a dynamic of us and them in the vampire myth. The vampire is held up as a mirror to the human psyche, representing not only the unknown in others, but also that which is unknowable in ourselves. It is for this reason that vampires have been such an enduring construct, and one which we have felt compelled to flesh out and adorn.
Popmatters