Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
By: Seth Grahame-Smith / Narrated By: Scott Holst
Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
No seriously! The man was indeed a hunter of vampires! I kid you not!
-OR- So you would truly believe after listening to Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Author Seth Grahame-Smith puts in just the right amount of honest to God, straight and true history and twists it eeeeeever so sliiiiightly so that we see that America was The Place to Go if you were a vampire. All that freedom, all that slavery! ‘Twould have been an AWEsome place for the Undead!
I’d tried to listen to Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies before, and whilst I’d chuckled a couple of times in the beginning, I have to admit that I fair soon stopped listening to it cuz it was reeeeeally a stretch to knit zombies into language of the era. Ho-hum. So I was just a wee bit hesitant about listening to this, feeling that yet aNOTHer category near and dear to my heart, History! was gonna kinda sorta be twisted to be just a vampire free for all. That said, the reviews swayed me, and when it was on sale? I was THERE!
The story opens with the ubiquitous wannabe writer who has an unfinished novel in his bottom drawer, stuck in middle-age, stuck in the middle-of-nowhere, stuck in a dead end job, getting on speaking terms with one of the wealthy types who frequent his store: This is Henry. And whilst they’ve an amicable relationship, our narrator tells us that he doesn’t know what to make of it when Henry stops by and drops off a package, then urbanely scoots outta the place.
What has he left our narrator? A package of journals… once penned by Abraham Lincoln… President of the United States and, it turns out…? A vampire hunter!
The story follows young boy Abe, a precocious child who had no learning but whose mother taught him his letters and encouraged him. He didn’t like his ne’er-do-well father so much, and it would turn out that the oft-heard story of Abe’s grandpa’s violent demise is told differently, setting Lincoln on a different path. Yes yes yes, there’s plenty about his life, his career choices, his first true-love (Taken not by disease but by… yessss! a vampire, thus ceMENting Abe’s grudge against the vile brutes!), and later his fraught passion for one Mary Todd whom he canNOT marry because her father is on friendly terms with the Not So Good Vampires.
But mostly it’s about that life-altering choice he makes after hearing about his Pa’s pact with a vampire that cost his mother her life. It makes him buff up, beef up, fine hone his ax throwing skills, do fancywork with knives, stalk vampires to kill them. It’s on one such hunt where he tracks an old woman who turns out to be the vampire who’s stealing children and leaving their dead husks behind. Abe is kidnapped by the vampire who kinda sorta saves his life, and thus begins a lifelong relationship with… a Good Sorta Vampire?
This is… Henry… Yup, THE Henry…
Henry, back then, set Lincoln off better prepared for what he’d encounter upon doing battle with the Undead. Garlic? Don’t bother; just makes it easier for a vampire to smell ya as ya try to creep up on ‘im. Lincoln would go along, tra la la, until he’d get a letter telling him which vampire to kill and where to find him/her. Henry would do the sleuthing, and Lincoln would do the dirty bit.
There’s so much to like here, exceeeept the narration. It was NOT bad, not by any stretch of the imagination. But having already listened to These Honored Dead narrated by Lloyd James, I’d kinda gotten my Abe Lincoln Variations cemented by James’ voice, his kinda early American twang-ishness. I s’pose narrator Scott Holst does a decent job, especially since this is of a modern-day dude reading and learning from journals, but most of this is Abe’s story, his whiplash action and hijinks, and Holst just can’t manage an earlier and statelier form of English/grammar. Indeed, a couple of times at the very beginning of Abe’s journaling, Holst attempts august tones, but fairly soon he just up and quits it, attempts nothing at all, so that the vast entirety of this sounds like some dude in a sports bar yakking at you, rather than the courtly airs and history of a solemn man’s exploits. So gee, soooo wishing that Lloyd James had been chosen, or that someone who at least attempted formal speech was handed the job.
Cuz seriously, this is a fun fun story, and I soooo loved the mixing, the melting pot of straight history with macabre farce. John Wilkes Booth, a vampire? NATURALLY! The slave-holding South being necessary as a pleasure frontier for vampires to get their fill of blood, to use human beings up, terrorize them, drain them of blood, toss them aside? But of COURSE! Friend Joshua Speed showing up here as a fellow Vampire Hunter? UnDOUBTedly!
Come for the farce, sit still for the history, stand up and cheer when a baaaaad vampire gets an ax through the heart! Grahame-Smith got it sooo right for this 11-hour bloodbath!
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