School Library Journal

Gr 8 Up–The entertaining Literature, History and Lore, and Movies describe the metamorphosis the vampire persona has undergone since its early role as a truly feared monster in Babylonia and its appearance in popular 19th-century tabloid stories, to its cinema debut in a 1916 German movie and beyond. With little overlapping material, the titles describe how the characteristics of a vampire have changed as people’s understanding of the world around them has developed. “Strange as It Sounds…” sidebars house oddball facts such as “The first script of the Twilight film was very different from the book. Bella was a track star, and FBI agents used Jet Skis to chase evil vampires” (Literature). The thoroughness with which the subjects are treated and the connections made to literature and cinema make these books excellent choices. Encounters and Do They Exist? describe in more detail how, in the past, people’s ignorance about illness and death, and truly brutal historical figures (Countess Bathory and Vlad Dracula are two) led to a belief in vampires. Both titles go on to describe modern-day instances of vampirism. These volumes are darker than the other three, as the details are explicit: Encounters, for example, describes how a student stabbed his elderly neighbor 22 times, then removed her heart and drank her blood, “in an apparent attempt to turn himself into a vampire.” Of additional concern with these two titles is the vagueness of some of the source notes, especially where interviews are concerned.