The first problem with them is that they attempt to sell them as pop-culture guides, with a mystical wisp of folklore to back it up. There's nothing wrong with scholarly works on movies, novels, or comics, but the focus should be on those things, and not the often unsensationalistic folklore that exists.
If they're not plagiarizing eachother, meaning, they literally just relist the entries from other books, and add a few 'newly discovered' terms that have been dusted off and re-applied to vampire folklore, they're putting in a narrative which can only be described as juvenile.
We have an entertainment culture of vampires, 'Buffy,' 'Blade,' 'Underworld,' 'Van Helsing,' and nostalgia for old Hammer Films and Bela Legosi. Nothing wrong with that, but once you blur the lines between what happens in movies, and where the mythology came from originally, you seriously compromise real research.
Let's examine some of this crap, to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
"The Vampire Watcher's Notebook" also known as the Vampire Watcher's Handbook. I have no idea why the title and author has changed, but its the same piece of crap. Now maybe this book was designed by role-playing gamers, or Buffy the Vampire fans, but technically, the text in this book really could fill a 10 page pamphlet. (Speaking of pamphlets, have you read Sean Manchester's "Vampire Hunter's Handbook?" It has even less info than this waste of trees.) This book is an excellent example of complete delusional thinking, it essentially offers nothing but a mindless juvenile book with some information about vampires, while not claiming to be entertainment. It is the equivalent of the multitudes of 'how to be a vampire' books that are churned out ad nauseum, only it is for 'vampire slayers.' I wonder if anybody will ever use this book to learn how to cut off heads of vampire-wanna-be's. Essentially, it is probably what Manchester wanted to write, but instead he veered off the subject by spending 40 pages whining about his bizarre rival in the vampire-hunting business. This leads us to the over-sized, waste of space, too many pages of nothing, "Vampire Slayer's Field Guide to the Undead"by Shane MacDougall. This piece of trash is not only a bit too heavy to be a 'field guide,' it adds all kinds of subjects that really have no business in any sort of encyclopedia about vampires. It's sad to see Whitley Strieber's name on the cover, promoting it. This is a perfect example of vampire-obsessed people who want to add as much garbage like their favorite pop-art, and personal new age religious ideas, to a subject that has enough trouble being seriously researched. Yes, I just said that. It has entries set up, where he then describes what he calls 'vampires of the world.'
What he then does is list them as if they are merely other names for the same thing, or writes descriptions making them seem like they are all just different types of vampires, different sizes shapes and country origins. He essentially repeats information found in other books, and actually gets some of it wrong, with a strong narrative on his part, as if he's trying to convince you that these vampires are what he tells you they are, but offers no reasonable evidence or information supporting his 'narrative.' It is far from being a scholarly work in any sense, and does a great disservice to anyone researching this folklore. He ties together folklore that isn't, and does so, by 'just saying so,' not by drawing on parallels or comparisons, or translations. His information is directly taken from other books, without saying anything different, new or extensive. The entries are loose, and missing information that can be found in the books he's stealing from. What he's doing is common among these 'guides' and 'encylopedias' and that is ignoring the sources of his folklore research, ignoring cultural contexts, and ignoring any understanding of where these things come from. A look at Alan Dundes compilation in Vampires: A Casebook, and you'll see that 'vampires' are quite a few things more than a simple definition, and that many cases reported by Summers and Calmet and others cannot be defined as 'vampires' at all, and even they bring this up, but offer the note of the account because of its similarity. This guy just files through these books, sees a name, and puts it down as a vampire. Puts it down as 'vampire #234' and leaves it at that. Manchester at least spares us the long lists of varieties of folkloric entities, and just hits you with his ideology, the rest of these are not happy with that, they want to compile 'the biggest vampire book ever.' Like J. Gordon Melton, who, in his "Vampire Book" offers hundreds and hundreds of entries all mixed together with Hammer Horror movies, and Bela Lugosi trivia, and loose entries and not very researched entries, along with serious folklore with footnotes. Somebody should have told him to either write a book that was more focused on something and not a massive compilation of all his favorite entries. The problem is, as a vampire encyclopedia which includes pop-culture, he's left a shit-load of stuff out of this book, and as for a vampire encyclopedia on folklore, he's left a shit-load of stuff out, and while you end up with a b
ook that's 800 pages, its too much, not enough, and essentially a pain in the ass if you're actually trying to look up something on either subject, because not only do you have try to find it lodged in between 'non-fictional' stuff, you always come up short. He does offer a cleaner narrative, and perhaps the better of all these nonsense books, but its not worth it (well, maybe, you can get this thing on ebay for cheap, nobody is buying it I guess anymore.)Again, the problem is a lack of examination. A lack of analysis.
If its an encylopedia, you obviously don't expect analysis, but its what they are trying to do, when they lump some of this shit together. Maybe I'm giving them way too much of a benefit of the doubt, that they simply are stupid people who have no idea what the fuck they are doing, but they 'want' to give you their 'analysis' in every entry, but then leave it short, with no backup, and no references, and essentially just give out these terms like they know what the hell they're talking about, but if they actually read the books which do analyze this stuff that they're stealing from, they wouldn't be churning out this crap.
Studying folklore is neither taking all these accounts as literal fact, nor is it lumping it together with modern pop-culture, or sensationalizing it so that it sounds like it fits in with modern pop-culture ideas. There may be something useful in pop-culture, and modern novels and tales, but it does not help in the examination of old folklore and mythology. What these books do is not what they present themselves to be, even loosely, and that is "encyclopedias," or guides. Trivia books, poorly compiled, maybe, but folklore examinations--they are not. "Encyclopedias of the Undead, " is a literal joke. Barber's "Vampires, Burial and Death" is quite an excellent examination of folklore, and even Montague Summer is, even though they are quite different, with totally different conclusions. A better encylopedia would be a compilation of terms and accounts without ANY narratives trying to relate it to Bela Lugosi films at all. Matthew Bunson's vampire encyclopedia is a good one, it covers vampire crimes, folklore and pop-culture, but without sensationalizing any of it, or attempting to be more than it is. There are no pictures in his book, a good start. (We've seen all the pictures that are in the Annotated Dracula, spare us.) It is concise, but not flashy, sorry Whitley. Rosemary Guilley's "Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves and other Monsters" is a little better idea, at least not attempting to "classify" many entities and mythical creatures as 'vampires' but in the end, it veers in that direction. She does invent classifications of her own, and at least makes the effort to explain that she's looking for 'blood suckers,' but again, without analysis. You can't have it both ways, you can't begin classifying shit without analysis. Well, I suppose you can, but starting out creating a classification system, and then digging up all these mythological terms, and then fitting them into your classifications without any analysis, such as, 'does this really fit in with this category, and here's why' after you examine the culture origins of such a term, entity or concept. Otherwise you're writing, for example, that you've decided that 'stakes must work on vampires 'cause it says so at least 20 times in various accounts of superstitions,' without understanding the origins, following their paths through history to see if there might be reasons that developed over time, and just why you might think that. Now this doesn't make for a good simple encyclopedia, but what the hell are you doing then, making shit up? If you think that something is the way it is, while relating it to folklore, you better tell us why, because there are enough charlatans tell us they are experts, vampires, and vampire slayers and that just doesn't cut it. Perhaps you can make a case, even a shallow case, but these people aren't making cases, they're not just presenting information either--they ARE putting forth a narrative of their own on all this information, and if one wanted to do some research, these books don't help, they hinder. You have to weed through this bullshit about wiccan stones, complete misunderstandings about Tibetan Buddhism presented as facts, multiple irrelevant entries on crows, animals, totems, bigfoot(???) and other concepts which are there for no other reason than to add more fluff to their fluff.
Bob Curran's "Encyclopedia of the Undead: A Field Guide to Creatures That Cannot Rest in Peace," is perhaps the best example of all of someone who wants to say something about something, but ends up saying the same thing as the rest of these people. (And wow what a long title, I guess they have to keep re-supplying us with variations on the same damn title.) His book is fully of the most ridiculous illustrations, and the most ridiculous title, and adds once again a lot of irrelevant information. In this case, its not irrelevant to him, he WANTS to believe in vampires, in a very bad way, and he wants you to believe too. When you listen to him talk on talkshows, he's got a lot of interesting things to say, but when you look at his books, its like, oh God, not another one of these. He wants to write a different book, but he seems to just end up following the rest of the crowd with this pulpy, sensationalistic garbage.
Hell, there is so many of these books, I won't waste any more time listing them here. The hard-bottom point here is, these people want to believe in vampires, they want to be the one to perhaps seduce you to believe in vampires, and they 'touch' various subjects quickly, rapidly, vaguely, with no sensitive analysis at all, nor any common sense. If you like books with lots of pictures and endless paragraphs of information you read again and again, Manuela Dunn Mascetti's Vampires: The Complete Guide to the World of the Undead is your book, even though its severely IN-complete, and severely light on information too. There IS no end to these things, and every time I pick one up, I find the same crap over and over in a different wrapper, and whether the author is a pagan with a burning desire to put his own spin on things, (actually making outright claims about the 'reality' of vampires like John MIchael Greer's Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings, without any proof, evidence, or even well analyzed speculation...not to mention weird boastings about being some sort of Druid Priest), or whether he's a Christian, claiming to be a Bishop, exorcist, expert and many other things, who essentially plagiarizes, re-writes and scrambles around paragraphs and sentences from other vampire 'guides,' it is paving a road of vampire studies that is clouding the information we actually do have. People are writing this crap at light speed, and nobody can write anything different.
There is one book, which I can't stand because of its seriously overt anti-religious, pro-pagan whining, which actually attempts to make its points in a scholarly way(although he loses it halfway through the first 80 pages) is Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead by Bruce McClelland. Two things it is not: its not a cultural history, nor is it about Vampire slayers, but nonetheless, he's dug up some good research. He babbles on about Buffy the Vampire slayer, being some sort of fascist conspiracy against pagans, and even the X-Files, in his section on pop-culture, but leaves out just about everything else, probably never saw any other shows or movies, or didn't want to do the research. But, at least he admits in his well constructed, but poorly focused work, that he really is 'ranting and raving' in the introduction. In his book, which is not what I would have expected (a book about vampire slayers--of which a decent book could be written, I have the research for one), and is really a political book poorly presented, he actually dug up stuff (that is not entirely relevant to his own points) that nobody else did! High marks for that, and for being different from all this other crap. If you can filter through his nonsense, with your highliter marker, you can find the relevant folklore in there that is freshly researched.
There's plenty more vampire 'guides' utilizing more folklore in order to promote to people how they can use, abuse, and drink their friends' blood, but its utterly pointless to talk about those in this article.
The books which don't get read are the boring looking ones with no pictures, with subdued covers, and lots of texts and footnotes, and of course, actually have the most information.
What I wish these 'vampirologists' would do, is take a look at what they're reading, and what it is they are saying. Usually they are saying nothing, but its clear they want to spin the material their way, while presenting meaningless trivia guides for the public to eat up, and miss what is really there. Well, I'm not going to screw around with this stuff, there are books by this creepy guy named Lawrence Gardner that don't mess around, and once some of these sociopaths get a hold of his thoroughly researched outright bizarre propaganda, we're in for real trouble folks, especially Sean Manchester, Holy Grail priest, and gatekeeper, because the lines between these self-styled vampire-slayers and the vampires are blurring in ways you can't imagine.
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