First off I want to say a huge thank you to the publisher Pen and Sword History, the author Violet Fenn , and to NetGalley for letting request it as well as for letting me read and review it and I'm so glade that I did because it was a great read for those who love reading anything that deals with vampires just like me , this book is also perfect for those who love to watch vampire movies which is other thing I love, and I give points to the author for putting this together. Because not only do you learn of vampire history, but you also get to learn abut their origins in mythology and literature and their enduring appeal on television and films and vampire lore . But the biggest win for me was the references she made to books and movies , some I knew and others I didn't , and after reading this I want to go and watch some of the movies she named which is great because I love old moves and those are the ones I might end up watching like Dracula ( which not only one of my all time favorite books but movie as well )

I enjoyed A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture well enough, but not throughout the whole book. The author sometimes goes a bit off topic, talking about other horror characters, ie: Frankenstein.

While I did learn some interesting stuff, I also found it lacking in depth. The author would start on a paragraph and end it with one word or a phrase then go onto a new subject or gloss over something with no detailed explanation.

Thank you Netgalley for the eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

“A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture“ by Violet Fenn [4/5]

Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for the review copy

This is a non-fiction book about vampires. And I think it is a very entertaining one. Non-fiction books are really tough to review for me because I do not think a lot of us would be able to spot mistakes or inaccuracies. So please, bear with me.

I want to say I read this book at exactly the right time. I came into this book having bing-watched the three episodes of BBC and Netflix's Dracula mini-series (which I really love) and Fenn references this series throughout. I get the feeling she liked it a lot too (and it is one of the most recent adaption of Dracula). Though I think she might have misquoted the series one time, early in the book but I am not entirely sure. I was very happy that Fenn decided to not only write about the vampire stories people always tend to write about but also used depictions that are not as well known side by side to the very popular series and movies. You do not need to know all of them because she describes most of the series she discusses. Some might argue that important vampire depictions are missing in this book but I would say she finds the right mix between historical depiction, more modern ones and how the vampire depictions developed throughout the ages.

It is also written in a more informal tone so if you are looking for highly academic research on vampires in popular culture you will not find it in this book. Don't get me wrong, she explains everything really way and uses a lot of examples for what she wants to say, but Fenn's tone is more colloquial than academic and I think this makes the book a lot easier and more fun to read (because I know not everyone enjoys non-fiction of the more academic nature).

If you already know a lot about the history of vampires in popular culture you might already know a lot of the things Fenn mentions in her book. But if you are new to the topic and are interested in it I would recommend picking up this book as it serves as a good introduction.

I enjoyed this book quite a lot. It is probably not suitable for true students of the subject as it is definitely not an academic treatment. The book would have benefitted from better editing -- I did spot a number of typo-style errors and spelling and grammatical mistakes. I also would have recommended a more cohesive structure. To be honest the book read like a series of blog posts with not much effort to bridge them together. That said, it was a very interesting and entertaining series of blog posts, especially for a casual reader such as myself. I particularly appreciated the timeline at the end.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing an ARC copy for my review.

A book about the popular culture in vampire lore certainly needs ruthless research and collation even if the author specifically focuses on the Western vampiric canon. The first chapter is similar to other books I have read about the history of the vampire and is a nice refresher. The author gives her personal touch to the prose. After that, the book falls short of my expectations. Ana Lily Amirpour's critically acclaimed A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) and Park Chan-wook's Thirst (2009) never make the cut. Neither do books like The Delicate Dependency by Michael Talbot (a philosophical vampire treatise) and Fevre Dream by George R. R. Martin (the man should be appreciated for more than just Game of Thrones) make an appearance. And these are just four examples most vampire/supernatural/horror enthusiast are aware of. There is a whole rabbit hole of Victorian, noir, retro vampire fiction and slasher movies that I am not going to talk about here. I am afraid despite having read the Twilight series (as an omnivore vampire lore reader) I find it hard to give positive ratings to a nonfiction book on vampire where Meyer's work is more than overrepresented. The research work is shoddy at best.

This book is a fun easy read a dive into Vampires in popular culture.With lots of good stories from history. The authors obviously dislike off twilight is throughout 😂.I have a whole heap of book and movies to read and watch from the references made in book all listed at the end.

A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture is just that - it explores the history and origin of the vampire and how the rules of the creature of changed. The book looks into vampires of specific movies and tv shows and even comic book and songs. Highly recommended to anyone who is interested in vampires.

The subject matter of this book is absolutely in my wheelhouse, so you can imagine how excited I was to read this. And how sad I am to give it such a low score. Firstly, it needs major editing. There are run-on sentences galore, dependent clauses modifying subjects incorrectly, and the occasional odd word choice. The author also names Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as Godstone. Not once, but multiple times. Was this an instance of bad auto correcting?

As for the history, most of it is already old hat to anyone interested in vampires and goth subculture. Very little new info is to be found. The discussion of different vampire media is choppy and reads more like a hackneyed encyclopedia of movie summaries with some thoughts in why humans love vampires so much. There are random, sometimes snarky parenthetical asides that offer little to the discussion. I feel as though I just read a paper by a moderately clever fifteen year-old, not a fifty year-old author.

The best part, the most relevant to our interests, was the final interview chapter with different, relevant people, either involved in the goth lifestyle or involved in pertinent media. I think the author interviewed Dacre Stoker, but somehow forget to inform the reader when the voice of the interviewee abruptly changed.

This needs heavy editing before its published.

This looked like an interesting read. I enjoyed learning about how vampires have been presented throughout history, and I particularly liked learning about the different myths and superstitions that people used to have.
My one criticism is that the amount of summary for some movies or texts seemed to outweigh the analyses. Even though I wasn’t familiar with some of the movies described, I felt like there was too much summary.

This was a thorough look at vampires in western tradition. Though the author admits she doesn't know enough about other versions of vampire folklore, I would definitely be interested if she decided to tackle that at a later date. Overall, this book was well thought out and pulled examples from a wide range of stories.

You only get a few pages into this book before you realize that Violet Fenn is not an academic historian nor is she used to writing long-form non-fiction. The book is disorganized and choppy and difficult to read. It sticks to North American and European popular culture and ignores all of the hungry Asian vamps of film and fiction of which there are oodles. The scholarship is shallow.

This book feels like a bunch of blog posts strung together. The chronology is erratic and when the same topic, like about Buffy for example, comes up in a different setting, some of the text is awfully similar. In the ARC, at least, there is not much warning when topics change. I hope that a graphic designer has helped with the final edition.

I don't really think you will get much from this book.

Dracula has been around for over 200 years (or close to 1000 if you count the stories and legends), beginning with written publications by Lord George Gordon Byron (The Giaour) and John William Polidori (The Vampyre). Through the years the vampire legends have grown and become a part of our pop culture, and many of us have embraced them and hungered for more.

Author Violet Fenn leads us on a tour through the years, recounting the earlier tales when science played little part in the things that went bump in the night, including the periods when even newspapers would report the unexplainable as fact. As civilization evolved the tales found new ways to spread, reaching out into movies, television, and song.

Some may feel that the book rambles at times, running back and forth across the centuries. With a subject like this, though, there could be so much content that the book could easily double in size. Rather than producing a bloated and potentially boring collection of chronological facts, Ms. Fenn has separated the book into different themes. Chapters titled “Dead Sexy,” “Vampire Next Door,” “Virtue and Vampires,” and “The Last Sunrise” each paint a picture and help prepare the reader for what’s coming. I liked that not only was the written word featured, but movies were touched on along with TV shows, poetry, pop songs, and comic books. Yes, comic books! The book also discusses our fascination with vampires, tastefully delving into the sexy aspect of vampires and conjecturing how close do we want to get (i.e., from holding vampires at arms-length to wondering if we want to be one?).

The back of the book contains an interesting chronology of items mentioned in the book, followed by a bibliography, a filmography, and an index. The author has also included an interesting assortment of pictures at the very end.

In the author’s own words, Dracula “…is all of us – our innermost desires and dreams and fears, pulled together and brought to life in an overwhelming mixture of terror and lust.” Ms. Fenn presents her subject with a touch of wit, sure to keep readers entertained. Four stars.

My thanks to NetGalley and Pen & Sword for a complimentary electronic copy of this book.

A rather enjoyable tribute to vampires and their history, in the real world and popular culture. I particularly enjoyed the "jazz vampires" chapter, mainly because I recognised many of the references and got introduced to a book series I'm excited to start on (Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London).

Despite having "vampire fatigue" after years of absorbing shows like True Blood and Buffy, and books like Queen of the Damned and Lestat, I'm still intrigued to discover variations and reimaginings by various authors. I've grown bored of Anne Rice's versions, but loved John Alvide Lindquists'. As the author suggested, maybe the definition of "vampires" shouldn't be limited to what Dracula or Nosferatu offered a long time ago. Like most things, it's always open to interpretation.

I glazed a little bit over some of the paragraphs, particularly the ones concerning everything Twilight, and it gets a bit repetitive with the overuse of Dracula as examples, but overall it's a fascinating dissection of the myth behind vampires and their ilk. Go on, it won't bite!!

This was so up my street! I have loved Vampires ever since I was a child. I mean, who doesn't love a Vampire?
This book was brilliant! Not only did it look at some of the folklore, origins and rules about Vampires throughout the world and throughout the years. But, it also used specific popular culture references to explain various points about Vampires too. It looked at poetry, artwork, literature, films and music.
I learnt so much! Brilliantly written, and incredibly fascinating.

This is not so much A History of the Vampire In Popular Culture as a History of Some Vampires In Popular Culture and a bit of a history of Goth culture too. I wonder if it started out as the former, as whilst there are some good historicalr bits about the birth of pop culture vampires here, there is also a lot of Goth. I am not sure an interview with Wayne Hussey of the The Mission is essential in a book about vampires at all but to have that there and no discussion of say, Near Dark, or any mention of Blacula feels weird.

In the intro Violet Fenn tells us a few things. Firstly the book will not be exhaustive, and any book like this will have to be selective. Secondly that she is a goth from the West Midlands and has been so inclined since her teenage years (that being Sisters Of Mercy, Mission wave of Goth, she is now fifty because even if not undead we are all living too long). And so her key vampries are Christopher Lee's Dracula, Gary Oldman and then a bit of Buffy through to the Gatiss/Moffatt Dracula. She doesn't like Twilight. She spends far too much time talking about Twilight. And whilst the book touches on all the main themes you would expect when talking about vampires (eroticism, immortality, transgressive sex), I do think the concentration on things you could have easily consumed in Britiain in the 21st century misses a lot out. So by all means include the vampire in Being Human, but what does a vampire represent when he is living with a werewolf and a ghost. You can suggest vampires don't work in comedy because Leslie Neilsen in Dracula Dead And Loving It was lousy, but does that cover the times Bela Lugosi played it for laughs. Talk about eroticism, particularly touch on The Hunger, but where is the denuded bondage of Underworld. In the end when she makes another good point to continually return to the same examples - particularly the 2019 BBC Dracula - feels slapdash.

This is a pity because there is little wrong with many of the arguments, and this is not an academic piece so perhaps just a cursory survey of the the vampire stuff you have probably seen is probably good enough. And with the exception of Let The Right One In, every example cited here is in English. So while its a solid read, it left me wanting a lot more, not least to re-title it to A History Of Goth And Some Vampires In English, Mainly From The Last Forty Years.

An interesting look at vampires throughout popular culture, but this just wasn’t up my alley, a bit due to the repetitive summary-laden nature of much of it, but also because I do tend to be most interested in the original folkloric and literary vampire culture–not so much the mid-20th century onwards stuff.

Fenn does state in her introduction that this book is intended to be a more casual, fan-based look at vampires and how they manifest in pop culture throughout time. She splits her chapters up into the themes/tropes surrounding vampires–their general mystery of them, immortality, forbidden sexuality, wealth–and gives examples, usually chronologically, of how vampire characters in various mediums have met these tropes. Unsurprisingly, most of these examples are more modern movies or tv shows, so I was not familiar with many of them, and while Fenn summarizes the scenes or characters in question well, she almost OVER-summarizes them, while still not making me very interested in reading more about it. It is a difficult thing to find unique interpretations for multiple types of media when, even with their variations, they’re still using the same exact trope. The analyses given are decent, if mainly more fan-based than academic, but since I wasn’t terribly interested in the media used as examples, nor was the book written in a way to captivate me into being interested in them, I just ended up skimming after the first few chapters. The chapters are also overly-long and never really conclude, and tie together with a chapter thesis, so the focus despite the chapter themes, seemed lacking.

If you are more inclined to enjoy more modern interpretations of vampires and their lore, by all means, you will likely find this MUCH more interesting than I did. It just didn’t have enough traditional myth and history in it…. which I suppose I should have gleaned from the title, those aren’t exactly the “popular” culture any more, however much they may have shaped it.

3 stars from me, which means I like it! A History of the Vampute in Popular Culture is absolutely fascinating. Until now, I had not thought much about the vampire . . . except for when I am reading about one . . . or a family of them. How intrigued I was to learn that there are different species of vampires! For anyone who has enjoyed tales such as Dracula, Interview With the Vampire, and even Twilight, throw yourself into this book and learn more about the vampire!

In general, this book is a fun exploration into the world of vampires, and the larger implication of vampires in popular culture. Firstly, I am so glad this book did not end up as "Yea this whole thing started from Dracula" because that is simply not true. Vampires have been around for as long as superstition has been around. I really loved how the author connected the human psyche and experience to the creation and propagation of the myth. It's so easy to just say, "Yea vampires are sexy" but that can't just be the bare bones of the popularity. Fenn talks about the eroticism of vampires, but also the implications of life and death, as well as the male and female and experience. Highly recommend it as a fun non-fiction read.

Over the years vampires and other supernatural creatures have become more popular both in books and also films. As someone who does watch and also read books that contain vampires, I was interested to see what the authors' view was.

The author steps into a world that has its origins in myth, legend and folklore. She references some earlier literature as well as more modern both as a view to the points she makes and also to give various examples.

Referencing early works and how they were portrayed by writers and also how they were adapted to film. How they were received by censors, readers and viewers. She uses history to good effect as changing attitudes have given over to a wider acceptance of all things fanged.

More modern film and TV have glamorised the vampire, they are sharp-dressed, well educated and not all are the blood-sucking, bodice-ripping fiends. She delves into how they have become the "good guy" in some respects rather than a creature that should be cowered from.

This was a really entertaining read with many, many references to films and books across the years. It does give an insightful look at how perceptions have changed and how they have become more socially acceptable and almost have morals that mirror some of our own, humanised if you like.

This is a book that I found interesting and also thought-provoking giving an insight into the authors' thoughts on the legend of the vampire. It is one I would recommend.

I enjoyed learning about the changing views on vampires throughout the years in this book. Some of the themes were familiar, though I wasn't familiar with all the references. The main aim of the book is to discuss the changing opinions on vampires and their prevalence in popular culture. As a non-fiction book, it does a good job to examine various aspects of the history of the idea of vampires and also the subcultures that are influenced by the idea of vampires. There is a handy “Short Chronology of Vampire History” near the end of the book.

Given that the book didn’t intend to be an encyclopedia, I didn’t expect it to cover as much ground as it did. It also contained a few interviews on the topic of vampires and the goth subculture.

The media texts covered are many, from books, to movies, to shows, to musicals. The book mentioned Dracula BBC (2020) so the book is very up to date on vampire related shows. Not all media texts get the same amount of space in the book, typically those that had more space were used to illustrate themes or change in opinions of vampires.

My favourite part of the book is seeing how the idea of vampires developed. I enjoyed reading the various explanations for why certain views about vampires could have emerged such as about ‘vampires’ ‘shrieking’ when stabbed. Some of the information I have heard before but there were also some interesting things I have not heard about.

An aspect of the book that I didn’t like as much was the many summaries of the media texts. While they are interesting, I didn’t connect as much to the theme when I haven't watched/read the show/film/book. At the same time, I could still understand the themes so it was just the number of summaries that were a bit much.

Overall, I enjoyed reading the book, it was informative and interesting read. The conclusion wrapped up the themes nicely in a satisfying way.

***I received an ARC copy from NetGalley***

Thank you to the publisher and author for the ARC.