Vampire : the Complete Guide to the World of the Undead
Review by Cecily, submitted on 8-Dec-1992

Mascetti, Manuela Dunn. Vampire : the Complete Guide to the World of the Undead. New York : Grove Press, 1991.

I read Manuela Dunn Mascetti's Vampire : the Complete Guide to the World of the Undead, over the weekend, and I regret to say that I can not recommend it. It's a short, almost scrapbook style, compendium of information readily available elsewhere, done in an archly sensational style which I found cloying.

She's also committed one of what I consider the worst errors in a supposed native speaker of English: she uses ancestor when she means descendant. About 3/4 of the work is a mishmash of plot summaries from the original Dracula, Varney the Vampire, Carmilla, and other classics. The remaining quarter is full of speculative information on syphilis as a source of the vampire legend, with an unsupported statement that Stoker had syphilis himself.

She also assumes that the personality of Sir Henry Irving, Stoker's employer, was a source for the Count's theatrical tendencies. She doesn't have one note, and there's no trace of a bibliography, which disposes of any claim to being a scholarly work.

Even I, who hadn't paid much attention to this topic between starting to buy the MPI tapes of the original Dark Shadows last year and having my interest in vampires reactivated by Forever Knight, can tell that her film references are scanty.

In sum, I'd say that her research consisted of a recent scholarly treatment of vampires in the light of 19th century Austo-Hungarian records compared with what little is medically established about the decomposition of bodies buried without embalming. (I remember the book because I cataloged it, and then checked it out, but the title escapes me. Some the CotN will probably recognize it. If anyone wants to know, I'll check the catalog system and get back to you.)To this, she has apparently added a reading of Dracula (not in an annotated version, I suspect) and of Interview with the Vampire.

One more personal quibble: most of the illustrations are allegedly atmospheric photographs of graves and castles. They rarely have anything to do with the text, or even with vampires.

I suppose I'd better make the standard disclaimer that these are merely my personal opinions. I wouldn't waste money or a book club pick on this one.