Blair Hodgkinson’s Reviews > Real Vampires, Night Stalkers and Creatures from the Darkside > Status Update

Amateurish.

The disclosure of information in this book is highly disjointed. There's no connective tissue joining or analyzing anecdotes and extracts from other material, for instance.

There are chapter headings followed by selected case histories and anecdotes, but they never seem to come together completely in conjunction with the author's "beliefs" about vampires being demonic beings that feed on energy as surely as blood.

I'm already at the point of having to either read on tolerantly or fling this beneath the couch. Perhaps one might expect the writer of a book on "real" vampires to be a bit credulous, but some of the off-the-cuff theories are pretty out there.

Having read the introduction, it's clear the author believes in the paranormal and isn't a folklorist. His definition of vampires as "parasitic entities that enter our reality from the far reaches of the multidimensional universe to possess their victims and to feed upon their life essence and their very soul" is mumbo-jumbo to me. I'm usually more interested in how the folklore of the vampire developed and evolved.