The Last American Vampire

It’s always awkward to critique a published author, let alone an author who somewhat redefined and popularized an entire genre, parlayed that success into a career as an A-list screenwriter, and is set to remake a classic children’s horror film for the House of Mouse. I am, of course, referring to Seth Grahame-Smith whose seminal novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter caught the eye of fandom and Hollywood alike, catapulting him into a close working relationship with director/producer Tim Burton where he has not only adapted the latter novel (the less said about that movie the better) and a cinematic update of the soap opera Dark Shadows (fun but flawed), he has also penned a sequel to Burton’s Beetlejuice which is rumored to go into production shortly. Aside from working with the prolific director, Grahame-Smith is also writing The Lego Batman Movie and will be making his directorial debut reworking Disney’s 1983 adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

     
Despite this busy schedule, Grahame-Smith found the time to pen a sequel to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter entitled The Last American Vampire. The original novel was a surprisingly prescient metaphor of vampirism in relation to the history of American slavery, as we are a nation built by enslaving, feeding off of, and growing strong from the blood of an entire race of people. Despite what seemed like just another capricious book title designed to squeeze a few more dollars from the genre crossover fad, Grahame-Smith handled this historically sensitive issue with surprising taste and grace by avoiding the clownish and ridiculous to construct a novel that spoke to the heart of our national history and identity. What the author has presented this time around is a bit of a mess, a novel that tries to transfer the thoughtful and often understated treatment of the tragedy of slavery and the Civil War to the rest of world history.

     

Focusing primarily on Henry Sturges, the vampire who trained Lincoln as a lethal slayer of the undead, Grahame-Smith takes us on a Wikipedia fueled journey through the twentieth-century, showing us how Sturges was, in some manner, connected to just about everything in recent history. From catching Jack the Ripper, to the assassination of Rasputin, to serving as Eliot Ness’ untouchable enforcer, to the destruction of the Hindenburg, to a failed assassination attempt on Hitler, to serving as an agent of justice for numerous presidents throughout history, the narrative feels more like the adventures of an undead Walter Mitty than a worthy follow-up to the seminal Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. And while there were several high profile historical cameos in that initial novel, they always felt organic to the setting and the progression of the story, versus The Last American Vampire’s habit of simply throwing names at us for the sake of surprise. Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Nikola Tesla, John D. Rockefeller, Howard Hughes, and even Pocahontas improbably cross paths with the vampire, and in some cases are undead themselves.

     
A very loose plot connects this mishmash of a historical re-envisioning, and one is left with the impression that Grahame-Smith just needed to fulfill a publisher’s obligation for a sequel. Ultimately, the story rings hollow and, just as Grahame-Smith single-handedly established the horror/historical literary mash-up craze with his superior earlier works, he may have driven a stake into the heart of the genre with The Last American Vampire.