General Interest

Slayers and Their Vampires by Bruce A. McClelland

Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead

Bruce A. McClelland

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead is the first book to explore the origins of the vampire slayer, and it goes further to ask why the true history of the vampire slayer has been so long ignored. The author Bruce McClelland refuses to accept the heroism of most slayers like Dracula's Van Helsing or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who are routinely presented as superheroes acting above the law because of their special knowledge. Instead, he presents a non-romanticized history of the earliest vampire rituals in order to convey how much creative license figured into the refashioning of the vampire for the entertainment of the West. Slayers and Their Vampires describes how the literary and screen dramas obscured the darker nature of the slayer, whose persecution of a corpse is accepted as heroic rather than corrupt. Spanning a wide range of areas, this book will appeal not only to fans of Dracula, vampire, Buffy, and Anita Blake lore, but also to students of anthropology, sociology, European religious history, Slavistics, folklore, and cinematic and literary history.

Bruce A. McClelland has written three previous books, including his own poetry and some translations of Slavic vampire lore.

Spring 2006
296 pages