The Great Emancipator
vs. vampires

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter mashes up
historical fact and good clean killing

by SACHA JACKSON

Hot on the heels of ’09s best-selling literary mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith returns with Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, a biographical mash-up that delves into the 16th President’s little known hobby.

Years after his mother dies of the dubious “milk sickness,” Lincoln learns that she was really killed by a vampire, in return for unpaid debts. Horrified but consoled by the news, he vows to revenge her death, and starts knocking off the undead with his skilled and trusty axe. In time, he encounters Henry Sturges, a good-natured bloodsucker who appoints him his very own vampire hitman, sending Lincoln after specific, often politically well-placed undead until his own untimely death.

If you know nothing about Lincoln except that he was really, really tall and freed the slaves, then Vampire Hunter is relatively educational. Grahame-Smith stays somewhat true to historical fact, weaving unexplained events like the lost Roanoke Colony and even Lincoln’s love life into his vampire mythology. Moving between excerpts from Lincoln’s (fake) journal and Grahame-Smith’s narrative, it’s an easy and fun read that at times feels a little hokey. But that’s partly the point.

Grahame-Smith, who’s also a television and film producer (he worked on Michael Cera’s 2007 Internet series Clark and Michael), is clearly well attuned to the current pop culture climate and short attention spans, and he doesn’t try anything too complicated here. This takes its toll on the narrative, however. In Grahame-Smith’s telling, the biggest issue of Lincoln’s day—the abolition of slavery and the Civil War—becomes a tale of vampires vs. anti-vampires. But don’t go reading too much into this. There’s no allegory here, and any real link between slavery and vampires feels completely tenuous—they’re just straight-up easy blood.

What Grahame-Smith really taps into is the idea that these events don’t have to be treated as precious. And just because you’re talking about a revered man (and he does treat the material with reverence), it doesn’t mean you can’t have a bit of good, clean killing along the way.

What Becomes

When Scottish author A.L. Kennedy isn’t writing, she’s busy taking the stage as a stand-up comic. Kennedy’s wry sense of humour has always been part of her writing, but it seems particularly dark in her latest collection of short stories, What Becomes.

Besides the wince-inducing black comedy, there’s a real sense of darkness here, and aloneness. In the title story, a man sits alone in a movie theatre; in “Saturday Teatime” a woman floats alone in a darkened flotation tank; a woman calls a number just to hear the silence of a room in “Whole Family with Young Children Devastated.” The space in these stories becomes a character in itself—the narrators are so aware of their surroundings, and Kennedy so adept at describing them, that the reader feels a part of this landscape.

This solitude of her characters works, however, because for the most part, these characters are hyper aware. Their internal monologues are funny, self-deprecating jabs that make the character all the more believable. When the narrator makes fun of the floatation tank, calling it a flotation cupboard, a basement with a persistent leak, you can imagine yourself doing the same.

Nearly all the stories in the collection are written as internal monologues, but even when Kennedy moves away from that, like in “Sympathy,” a dialogue between two strangers having sex, the monologue is never far, always close by, echoing our own interior self-deprecation.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN VAMPIRE HUNTER
BY SETH GRAHAME-SMITH, GRAND
CENTRAL PUBLISHING,
HC, 352 PP., $26.99
WHAT BECOMES BY A.L. KENNEDY,
HOUSE OF ANANSI, PB, 232 PP., $22.95