What do you think?
Rate this book
Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World
A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the living
Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.
Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.
In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history—in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.
Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.
536 pages, Hardcover
First published September 9, 2025
90 people are currently reading
2280 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 1, 2025
A word of warning to start with. The subject matter of this book means that the author discusses people doing gruesome things to dead bodies, and this review will, to an extent, discuss that too. Look away now if you find that overly distasteful.
"In the 1010s, a Rhineland bishop wrote down a long list of superstitious errors, including two that concern us here. Adopting the voice of a probing confessor, Burchard of Worms asked:
‘Have you done what certain women, inspired by the devil, are in the habit of doing? When some infant dies unbaptized, they take the little one’s corpse, and put it in some secret place, and transfix its tiny body with a stake, saying that if they do not do this, the little child would rise up and would be able to injure many.… [And] when some woman needs to give birth but cannot, and dies in that misery during her fruitless labour, they transfix both mother and infant with a stake driven into the earth in the same grave.’
We all know the stories about staking vampires, and I had vaguely heard that corpse-killing was a real practice in pre-modern Europe, but this book provides a detailed survey. Although the subtitle refers to “vampire epidemics” the author highlights that historically, activities attributed to the undead extended well beyond bloodsucking, so in the text he generally uses terms like “the walking dead”, “the undead,” etc. Also, although he touches upon other parts of the world, the book is overwhelmingly focused on Europe. I suspect that’s because the bulk of the written and archaeological evidence is located in Europe.
Incidentally, the author doesn’t believe the undead were a historical reality. In this, my own views align with the author’s. He wants to understand what lay behind the beliefs and cultural practices around corpse-killing.
Something I was less convinced about was his assertion that beliefs around the undead were concentrated in northern Eurasia, where they co-existed “with a sense of permeable boundaries between the human, spirit, and animal worlds. These thought-patterns were not unique to the region (some of them also occur in Africa, for instance), but they are accessible through some helpful anthropology.” I can’t comment on the geographical extent of beliefs in the walking dead specifically, but it does seems to me that the idea of a permeable boundary between the human, spirit and animal worlds was historically pretty widespread and not limited to Eurasia. The author does concede that beliefs in the undead also exist(ed) in West Africa and pre-colonial Australia.
It seems there was a common belief that the walking dead had to have a physically intact corpse in order to get up and move about. They could therefore be counteracted by dismembering the corpse. As the author puts it, “a long procession of mutilated corpses weaves its way through this book.” Decapitation was perhaps the most common technique for dealing with the undead, along with removal of the lower jawbone. Severing of the feet, the breaking of leg bones, and the binding of bodies also feature, along with the famous stake through the heart, the surviving examples of which involved metal spear heads or spikes. In a group of cases found in Poland, female burials had sickles hooked around their throats. In the last resort the bodies of “the undead” were simply burned.
There seem to have been periodic eruptions of these practices, which the author links to crises, particularly periods of “spiritual” crisis, such as when pagan societies converted to Christianity, or during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He also discusses how the majority of “victims” were women, especially young women, and why this might have been the case. Further, he suggests that corpse-killing tended to happen in areas where there was little or no witch-killing. He makes the point that, where a society looks for scapegoats to reduce anger and resentment, then it’s probably better that they find those scapegoats amongst the already dead, rather than the living.
If I am being honest, I found this book a bit drier than I expected to, given the subject matter. At the same time it is strong in both information and analysis. Corpse-killing is a subject that has attracted far less attention than witch-killing. The author is to be commended for shining a light on a little known aspect of history.
"In the 1010s, a Rhineland bishop wrote down a long list of superstitious errors, including two that concern us here. Adopting the voice of a probing confessor, Burchard of Worms asked:
‘Have you done what certain women, inspired by the devil, are in the habit of doing? When some infant dies unbaptized, they take the little one’s corpse, and put it in some secret place, and transfix its tiny body with a stake, saying that if they do not do this, the little child would rise up and would be able to injure many.… [And] when some woman needs to give birth but cannot, and dies in that misery during her fruitless labour, they transfix both mother and infant with a stake driven into the earth in the same grave.’
We all know the stories about staking vampires, and I had vaguely heard that corpse-killing was a real practice in pre-modern Europe, but this book provides a detailed survey. Although the subtitle refers to “vampire epidemics” the author highlights that historically, activities attributed to the undead extended well beyond bloodsucking, so in the text he generally uses terms like “the walking dead”, “the undead,” etc. Also, although he touches upon other parts of the world, the book is overwhelmingly focused on Europe. I suspect that’s because the bulk of the written and archaeological evidence is located in Europe.
Incidentally, the author doesn’t believe the undead were a historical reality. In this, my own views align with the author’s. He wants to understand what lay behind the beliefs and cultural practices around corpse-killing.
Something I was less convinced about was his assertion that beliefs around the undead were concentrated in northern Eurasia, where they co-existed “with a sense of permeable boundaries between the human, spirit, and animal worlds. These thought-patterns were not unique to the region (some of them also occur in Africa, for instance), but they are accessible through some helpful anthropology.” I can’t comment on the geographical extent of beliefs in the walking dead specifically, but it does seems to me that the idea of a permeable boundary between the human, spirit and animal worlds was historically pretty widespread and not limited to Eurasia. The author does concede that beliefs in the undead also exist(ed) in West Africa and pre-colonial Australia.
It seems there was a common belief that the walking dead had to have a physically intact corpse in order to get up and move about. They could therefore be counteracted by dismembering the corpse. As the author puts it, “a long procession of mutilated corpses weaves its way through this book.” Decapitation was perhaps the most common technique for dealing with the undead, along with removal of the lower jawbone. Severing of the feet, the breaking of leg bones, and the binding of bodies also feature, along with the famous stake through the heart, the surviving examples of which involved metal spear heads or spikes. In a group of cases found in Poland, female burials had sickles hooked around their throats. In the last resort the bodies of “the undead” were simply burned.
There seem to have been periodic eruptions of these practices, which the author links to crises, particularly periods of “spiritual” crisis, such as when pagan societies converted to Christianity, or during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. He also discusses how the majority of “victims” were women, especially young women, and why this might have been the case. Further, he suggests that corpse-killing tended to happen in areas where there was little or no witch-killing. He makes the point that, where a society looks for scapegoats to reduce anger and resentment, then it’s probably better that they find those scapegoats amongst the already dead, rather than the living.
If I am being honest, I found this book a bit drier than I expected to, given the subject matter. At the same time it is strong in both information and analysis. Corpse-killing is a subject that has attracted far less attention than witch-killing. The author is to be commended for shining a light on a little known aspect of history.
Read
October 14, 2025round 1540 Martin Luther received a letter from a pastor in rural Saxony, asking for advice on how to deal with the corpse of a recently deceased woman who was steadily eating herself in the grave and, consequently, causing everyone in the village to die. It was an instance of a hungry ‘shroud-chewing’ corpse, often feared as the source of disease in 16th-century Europe. The severe Protestant reformer had no patience with ungodly peasant beliefs and angrily told his secretary ‘they only keep dying because they are so superstitious’. Luther suggested the villagers be told to get a grip and ‘go to Church and ask God to forgive their sins’.
Luther’s stance marks the cusp of a new dispensation in Northern Europe on matters supernatural. He was trying to establish a rigid division between the living and the dead (his attack on the doctrine of Purgatory also undermined the Christian rationale for ghosts lingering on in an in-between state). But Luther was fighting millennia of widespread belief in corpses coming back from their graves and well-established rituals for re-killing the restless dead. In a contemporary culture suffused with vampires and zombies, it might seem that Luther did not entirely win this argument.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
Luther’s stance marks the cusp of a new dispensation in Northern Europe on matters supernatural. He was trying to establish a rigid division between the living and the dead (his attack on the doctrine of Purgatory also undermined the Christian rationale for ghosts lingering on in an in-between state). But Luther was fighting millennia of widespread belief in corpses coming back from their graves and well-established rituals for re-killing the restless dead. In a contemporary culture suffused with vampires and zombies, it might seem that Luther did not entirely win this argument.
Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London.
March 23, 2026
This was my favorite nonfiction read of the year!
If you're like me, you're looking at this review because you're standing there in the bookstore thinking, "Gosh, this looks really interesting, but it is really long and also, maybe that title is the publishing version of clickbait?"
This book is definitely exactly what the title says. (Okay, so the actual word "vampires" is maybe a little bit clickbait. The author mostly uses the phrase "dangerous dead" to encompass a variety of beliefs, and only uses the words for vampires, zombies, etc, when he is discussing specific contexts.) If you are interested in actual times and places where people actually believe that the dead get up and walk around and/or prey upon the living, this book is extremely comprehensive in its overview.
So, is this book for you? I would recommend it if one or more of the following apply to you:
- You're a fiction reader who wants to know what real life source materials authors have been mining for ideas
- You're looking for something different. I've never read a book on quite this topic.
- You aren't daunted by a 500 page book that leans more academic than sensational. (Personally, I don't like nonfiction that is so sensationalized that it borders on fiction.)
- You enjoy unexpected anecdotes (um, someone in a real court case about theft casually mentioning that they're a werewolf who went to hell to steal back grain blossoms and thus prevent famine?) alongside analytical discussion of the socioeconomic and cultural contexts for these events
I really wish I was in a college class on this because I would love to dive in and discuss the ideas presented in the book. Instead, I guess I'll just have to bully someone else into reading it and discussing it with me in gruesome detail.
If you're like me, you're looking at this review because you're standing there in the bookstore thinking, "Gosh, this looks really interesting, but it is really long and also, maybe that title is the publishing version of clickbait?"
This book is definitely exactly what the title says. (Okay, so the actual word "vampires" is maybe a little bit clickbait. The author mostly uses the phrase "dangerous dead" to encompass a variety of beliefs, and only uses the words for vampires, zombies, etc, when he is discussing specific contexts.) If you are interested in actual times and places where people actually believe that the dead get up and walk around and/or prey upon the living, this book is extremely comprehensive in its overview.
So, is this book for you? I would recommend it if one or more of the following apply to you:
- You're a fiction reader who wants to know what real life source materials authors have been mining for ideas
- You're looking for something different. I've never read a book on quite this topic.
- You aren't daunted by a 500 page book that leans more academic than sensational. (Personally, I don't like nonfiction that is so sensationalized that it borders on fiction.)
- You enjoy unexpected anecdotes (um, someone in a real court case about theft casually mentioning that they're a werewolf who went to hell to steal back grain blossoms and thus prevent famine?) alongside analytical discussion of the socioeconomic and cultural contexts for these events
I really wish I was in a college class on this because I would love to dive in and discuss the ideas presented in the book. Instead, I guess I'll just have to bully someone else into reading it and discussing it with me in gruesome detail.
March 24, 2026
this not a bad book at all and it is both informative and entertaining. However it suffers from it's scope. There are sometimes pages of exhausting detail and then short intro paragraphs that make broad and vague statements about the impact of social changes in society without explaining anything further. This book was unexpectedly tedious at times despite the interesting subject matter and took me two months to read. Like tell me why the spread of Christianity in Iceland was traumatic, tell me how that trauma led to corpse killing. It felt like the dots were not always connecting for me.
I also wish there was more discussion about death rituals post-1000 which as stated above, would have clarified the conditions for corpse killing. This was well discussed in the section on China for example however lacked in other sections.
For positives, I did enjoy seeing how the concept of the living corpse transformed overtime and the various ways different cultures were in conversation with each other across time and space.
I also wish there was more discussion about death rituals post-1000 which as stated above, would have clarified the conditions for corpse killing. This was well discussed in the section on China for example however lacked in other sections.
For positives, I did enjoy seeing how the concept of the living corpse transformed overtime and the various ways different cultures were in conversation with each other across time and space.
Read
April 28, 2026Killing the dead is better than killing the living. It provides a therapeutic, largely innocuous outlet for impulses of fear, hatred, and paranoia.
Corpse-killing is mainstream and not marginal. therapeutic and not pathological. Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.
Many world cultures - notably those practising secondary burial - do not see the decomposition process as repellent, but instead a natural moving-on that becomes sinister only if it is supernaturally halted.
When Greek villagers remember the dead with love, their best hope for them is to see their clean white bones and know that they have reached 'joy and gladness'.
2004: When the police arrived at the cemetery they were followed by a journalist, and for the first (and perhaps last) time ever, the aftermath of a vampire-killing was captured on film. So we can all watch the lurid scene: the cemetery with police-car lights flashing, the violated tomb, and Mitrica brandishing his pitchfork at the camera. It also emerged that Mitrica had drunk half a litre of plum brandy before his enterprise: a detail that may have been more central to corpse-killing rituals in the past than we can ever know.
Corpse-killing is mainstream and not marginal. therapeutic and not pathological. Like other extreme rituals, it is distressing at the time but leaves people feeling good afterwards.
Many world cultures - notably those practising secondary burial - do not see the decomposition process as repellent, but instead a natural moving-on that becomes sinister only if it is supernaturally halted.
When Greek villagers remember the dead with love, their best hope for them is to see their clean white bones and know that they have reached 'joy and gladness'.
2004: When the police arrived at the cemetery they were followed by a journalist, and for the first (and perhaps last) time ever, the aftermath of a vampire-killing was captured on film. So we can all watch the lurid scene: the cemetery with police-car lights flashing, the violated tomb, and Mitrica brandishing his pitchfork at the camera. It also emerged that Mitrica had drunk half a litre of plum brandy before his enterprise: a detail that may have been more central to corpse-killing rituals in the past than we can ever know.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Did Not Finish
April 28, 2026Only about 50% (pages 166 to 428/519) is actually about what the book is marketed as being about
December 8, 2025
This is a very detailed look at the fascinating topic of how and why people have 'killed the dead'. Despite the slightly misleading subtitle (presumably chosen for market appeal), Blair considers a broad range of cases where, in way or another, corpses have been thought to exercise a malign influence—spreading death & disease, visiting and distressing friends & family, and, yes, blood-sucking—that needed to be stopped. His thesis that young women were particular targets for corpse killing is compelling, and his idea that persecuting the dead is an overlooked outlet for fears that might otherwise have targeted the living is thought-provoking. A particular highlight is Blair's treatment of archaeology, especially medieval burial evidence (his academic forte), where he provides helpful and legible diagrams. I was less convinced by his emphasis on 'motifs', which sometimes leads him to insist upon the influence of one story/culture upon another in a distant time and distant place, relying on extremely speculative chains of transmission. Still, the parallels he highlights between practices in Anglo-Saxon England, high medieval contexts, early modern eastern and central Europe, 19th century America, etc, are intriguing—and it is to Blair's great credit that he attempts an explanation, even if some specialists of particular periods are unlikely to be persuaded. This book has its problems, and may be too singular in its focus at points. Overall, though, I am in awe of the huge amount of learning, reading, and ambition that went into it.
January 31, 2026
Where does our idea of vampires come from? Is it just a myth or superstition? Or do people really believe this and act on it? Is there a history of vampires and what is revealed about mans' true values? Explore the stories, motifs, and historical epidemics that created the lure we find in vampires today.
"Killing The Dead" may seem like a foolish book to read due to subject. However, it brought me so much fascinating insight into our beliefs, values, and what events can cause beliefs like these to happen. I learned so much more than just background history. I learned about faith and church history is mixed with the legends of the restless undead. This book will not leave my thoughts for a long time.
When we look at our fears, we will discover our most intimate beliefs.
"Killing The Dead" may seem like a foolish book to read due to subject. However, it brought me so much fascinating insight into our beliefs, values, and what events can cause beliefs like these to happen. I learned so much more than just background history. I learned about faith and church history is mixed with the legends of the restless undead. This book will not leave my thoughts for a long time.
When we look at our fears, we will discover our most intimate beliefs.
December 28, 2025
Humans never cease to amaze me. If you're a history buff strongly interested in anthropology - this one might be for you.
January 30, 2026
Very interesting! I didn't know how much I needed this highly unique and fascinating book.
April 28, 2026
A fascinating and in-depth tour through a wide variety of vampire epidemics, both historical and more present-day. Yes, you have to concentrate as it's very academic in tone, but there are some key ideas that are well worth the effort. I particularly liked the realisation that whenever people are blaming the dead for the difficulties in their lives and bringing them out of their graves in order to 'kill them again', they are at least not focusing on blaming the living for their problems. Hence vampire epidemics don't tend to coincide with witch-hunting eras, so mutilating corpses is a far better option than killing innocent women. The study of different cultural responses to vampire beliefs is also fascinating. And, yes, killing the dead still goes on in the present day, as the author reminds us. Well worth a read.
April 6, 2026
I’m somewhere between a 3.5 and a 4 on this one. There is no doubt that the author has total command of the subject matter and conveys the intricacies of the long history and geographical spread of corpse killing. He also shows how far Dracula and other such vampires are from the reality. But the amount of information conveyed was overwhelming: case after case, often with very little difference between them. And most of the cases are not primarily narrative but, rather, details about excavated grave sites and what can be inferred from them. If you want to read a very scholarly account of corpse killing, then this is for you.
April 8, 2026
Interesting and well-written, but ultimately I think it's just trying to do too much. The scope is incredibly broad, which means we spend a lot of time just listing things, trying to cover it all. There's not a lot of space left over for analysis and trying to pull some meaning out of the facts.
February 1, 2026
Weird and fascinating!
Did Not Finish
March 23, 2026Couldn’t get into it
March 30, 2026
I think the topic was very interesting, and I really enjoyed the mix of analysis, primary sources and photographs/diagrams, but the writing felt a bit dense at some points. 3/5
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews