Book of the Vampire – review

Author: Nigel Suckling

Illustrations: Bruce Pennington

First published: 2008

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: “An examination of the vampire in legend and history, taking Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a starting point since it is mainly responsible for the modern vampire’s notoriety. Nigel Suckling examines Dracula’s fictional ancestry as well as the folklore and historical characters (such as Vlad the Impaler and Countess Elizabeth Bathory) that informed Stoker’s many-layered monster. The book ends with a look at the vampire legend today and the resurgence of belief in such monsters.”

The review: The Blurb for this, as relayed above, is all well and good. However there are two blurbs. The inner dust jacket tells us that “Nigel Suckling is the UK’s leading authority on vampires and the myth and legend which surrounds them.” This leads me naturally to two thoughts, the first being that if he is such an authority why have I never heard of him before? The second being that this, therefore, must be amongst the most authoritative books on vampires, with no fear of inaccuracy.

To be fair the blurb does not match Suckling’s own introduction where he admits “In writing this I’m not setting myself up as any great authority on the subject. My starting point was uninformed curiosity…” Which is it? Given the content I would have to take the second (and Suckling’s own) admission and say shame on the publishers for misleading blurb, unfortunately it raises an expectation that can only be dashed.

One of the first things to strike me was when Suckling discussed Varney the Vampire. Firstly he re-summons the idea that it was written by Prest when it is mostly agreed that Rymer was the primary author, indeed Curt Herr offers an authoritative argument for Rymer’s penning of the series. Suckling suggests that it is “much like trying to read the collective scripts of a soap opera”, which in many respects it is, given the penny dreadful form was the soap opera of its day. However no real explanation of the penny dreadful form is given, instead Suckling goes on to admit “I gave up after a hundred or so pages,” which, to me, does not give Suckling the least bit of authority to write on the subject – at best he is recycling second-hand views and the overview of the story, placed as an appendix to the book, misses the mark on just about every level.

Of course the recycling of views would be acceptable if those views were properly attributed. For example, when discussing Carmilla, Suckling states “For a while, apparently, Stoker even considered making his central character female, basing her on the bloodthirsty Elisabeth Bathory, but no doubt this felt too much like plagiarism.” Fascinating, I’ve never heard this before and yet… where is the reference to establish Suckling’s supposition as fact. There isn’t one, so we cannot tell if this is true, and yet the influence of Le Fanu upon Stoker has long been established in the fact that Stoker did consider setting the book in Styria, as Carmilla was – for some reason this wasn’t mentioned.

Another example of reference failure was when looking at The Vampyre. Suckling suggests that when plays were performed based on the tale they were often double billed with plays based on Frankenstein. He then adds “no playwright went so far as to try and combine them into a single play, as has been done on film.” What film might that be? I ask with all excitement as I’ve never heard of it and, typically, Suckling does not say. Then I realise that he must be referring to Gothic and I stagger as, of course, this is about the creation of the stories, and the drug induced frivolities that led to said creation, and not a combination of the actual stories as Suckling intimated. Now the quote is perhaps just misleading, not useful in a reference book, but that is fine for me but what about another reader who perhaps doesn’t make said connection?

We are only up to page 29 with these issues and still in the heavily considered (within many a volume) classics of the genre. So, do things get better? Quite frankly, yes. As Suckling leaves the classics behind and explores the myths and legends from around the world the book improves. Part of this is down to the fact that Suckling writes in a way that is rather readable.

However, even though there are many quotations, which are referenced on use, there is no overarching bibliography and there are stories and suppositions added throughout that are not referenced at all. The book also contains no index itself. I was a little put out when we entered the realm of historic ‘vampires’ (Vlad Draculea, Gilles De Retz and Erzsébet Báthory) when the myth that Dracula was based on his historic counterpart seemed to be propagated, ignoring the fact that Stoker, at most, took a name and a few choice quotes to put into a character’s mouth.

This is vampire-lite and, in truth, quite sensationalistic in style. But it is readable and Pennington’s illustrations are lovely. 4 out of 10.