(10) JOHN BLAIR –

KILLING THE DEAD: VAMPIRE EPIDEMICS FROM MESOPOTAMIA TO THE NEW WORLD (2026)

 

“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 depth, that is, as a serious subject of scholarly study – while Blair entertainingly segues to modern vampire fiction at times, it is to contrast it with what anthropology and other academic disciplines reveal about actual beliefs or practices.

And by vampire epidemic as mass hysteria, Blair doesn’t mean an epidemic of vampires or people believing themselves to be vampires, running around biting people or drinking blood, but mass hysteria of people believing themselves to be stalked by vampires from beyond the grave – and not about to go down without a fight.

That’s right – the people in these vampire epidemics weren’t about to just sit around while the vampires stalked them, but rather to do a little preemptive stalking of their own right back at the vampires – or rather, a little preemptive staking, nipping them in the grave as it were. The front line of the war of the living against the dead was the grave – digging up suspect corpses, which were lucky if they got off only with staking.

An important distinction is that the vampires of vampire epidemics were the corporeal dead – not the incorporeal dead such as ghosts.

And as the subtitle indicates, vampire killing has a long history, from ancient Mesopotamia to the modern New World – “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 case anyone is inclined to scoff or sniff at superstition, Blair points to the British public in 1732 opening their morning papers to read of “lurid happenings” in eastern Europe – Serbian villagers digging up, mutilating, and burning corpses upon finding them “undecayed and bloated with blood” – where “centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior”.

Vampire epidemics were surprisingly persistent and prevalent throughout history, although interestingly the various beliefs comprising them tend to fall in distinctive geographic “belts” mapped by Blair.

And the most interesting argument by Blair is that they may not be all that bad. There are worse ways for societies to respond to “traumatic moments” – or have an outlet for “fear, hatred, and paranoia” – than by targeting the corpses of people that are, after all, already dead. The most obvious is of course targeting people that are alive and turning them into corpses, rather than taking a corpse and making it more of one – or less of one, depending on how you look at it.

 

RATING:

X-TIER (WILD TIER) – BEST OF 2026