Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2010 Novel by Seth Grahame-Smith)

 

Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

(2010 Novel by Seth Grahame-Smith)

 

This book is better than you’d think, and maybe that’s the problem.

 

If the forecasts of the end of paper-based publishing as we know, and the similar forecasts of end of the Novel as an important art form, prove correct, what will we be left with?

 

Well, one thing I note when I go into a bookstore is that though maybe I can’t find I personally want any more, there’s an ever-growing abundance of at least one product. The product is remarkably adaptable to our all-too-instantaneous culture and so deeply committed to vacillating fashions that though these books are individually ephemeral, they are collectively eternal. I refer to Novelty Books.

 

Each is quickly produced, and just as quickly forgotten, yet the space they occupy in the store is never empty, and if you return to that space over and over again, you will see that our impulsive and unconsidered consumption of facile distraction represents a continuum, demonstrating evidence of the hive mind, and proof of certain form of reincarnation. Moreover, within these Novelties, maybe there is (sometimes) the possibility of a (slightly) substantive literature (just barely) possible.

 

Both of Seth Grahame-Smith’s two most famous Novels, “Pride and Prejudice with Zombies” (2009) and this one, “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter” were commissioned for gimmicky series dreamed up by his editor at Grand Central Books. In both cases, Grahame-Smith was the only Novelist engaged who was able to play with the gimmicks, rewriting classics with Monsters, reimagining historical figures with Monsters, in a way that received significant, positive, critical attention. Grahame-Smith has a rare gift (or compulsion) to infuse some artistry to a throwaway idea. His literary career is distinguished by focusing on some heritox absurdity, then applying a sharper intelligence than many would think the subject deserves, and finally keeping his one-note-joke buoyed by imagination and exceptional attention to telling detail. He knows how the mechanisms of the B- and Exploitation Movie make a narrative move, but he also knows how to toss in just enough brain-candy so that we don’t feel as guilty while reading; like you did that time when mom caught you under the sheets with a flashlight flipping through the pages of a dirty magazine. (I should throw in; his first Book was a modestly- seriously-minded history of the Porn Industry.) Here we have (as Critic Gina McIntyre put it) “a great "'Saturday Night Live' sketch” transformed into a full blooded, even epic Novel.

In classic “high-concept” style (who the hell every coined “high-concept”? It’s deliberating misleading as it inevitably targets the lowest common denominator) the title says it all. I expected it to be fun, and it was, but I didn’t expect it to be as good as it was. And therein lies the rub -- it was good enough to disappoint. When I saw what Graham-Smith was capable of doing, he raised my expectations, and then I found myself disappointed he didn’t do even more.

 

No one reading this is expecting either a real biography, or something comparable to the truly timeless historical Novels like “War and Peace” (serialized 1865, published in one volume 1869). This is a populist Fiction about a President we like a lot more in Myth that reality. Rather than comparing this Book to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s non-Fiction, “Team of Rivals” (2005 and the basis the Movie “Lincoln” 2012 directed by Steven Spielberg) or Novelist Leo Tolstoy, we are more in the territory of the Movie “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939) that sentimental piece of heliography that was directed by John Ford and made Actor Henry Fonda a star.

 

Well, like “Young Mr. Lincoln,” only with more a lot more blood and a much higher body count.

 

Then Grahame-Smith’s surprises us with a Lincoln who is many times more believable than Fonda’s. This Lincoln is strongly sympathetic, frequently engaging in super-Heroic antics, but he’s neither paragon of some ideal (like Superman) nor an invitingly unoccupied vessel for the reader to fill with over-textural identification (like most Private Eye Heroes). Clearly, Graham-Smith learned a few things from comic-Book pioneer Stan Lee’s formula (Graham-Smith has collaborated with Lee) and here we see that the student far has excelled the master.

 

The Novel beings in 2009, with a Fictional version of Seth Grahame-Smith deep in a writer’s funk as he watches President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. At this historically appropriate moment, he is offered a confusing, disturbing, perhaps dangerous, but also irresistible commission: to edit and flesh-out a long rumored of but never-made-public diary which represents nothing short of a secret history of the Civil War, and by extension, America’s development, and the whole of Western Civilization. You see, the diary establishes that Vampires are real because it is Abraham Lincoln’s own record of his war against them.

 

The Novel switches back-and-forth between Lincoln’s secret dairies, which are of course Fiction, woven seamlessly in with Lincoln’s letters, which are real, with Grahame-Smith’s omniscient third person, which contains the testimony of surviving (though Undead) witnesses and a great deal of material pulled directly from more respectable historical sources.

 

It starts in Lincoln’s childhood and shows his development in rich and thoughtful in a way that too little Genre Fiction has the patience for. Deftly sketched are Lincoln’s complicated family tree, the challenges of his humble beginnings, his strained relationship with his father, his enormous personal drive, his insatiable intellectual curiosity, his independent thinking. We see how his life’s trajectories were guided by a series of early tragic losses and economic reversals. Lincoln’s famous battle with depression is woven throughout the Book, but treated with an appropriately light touch, because Grahame-Smith instinctively knows that had the depression truly been crippling, Lincoln would’ve never become Lincoln. It is somewhat removed from the “Cult of Lincoln” of popular Myth and somewhat closer to a figure Historian would recognize.

 

At least up-to-a-point.

 

The “up-to-a-point” part is the crux of the Novel, because in 1820 Lincoln realizes his life is being shaped by the capricious whim and insatiable hunger of Supernatural entities that are stronger, faster, more experienced, and more skillful than he. That launches his one-man covert-war against their Evil.

 

It was addressing Lincoln’s early days that the Novel is at its strongest. Rich in biographical detail of years that many, even Civil War buffs, are not fully familiar with, it’s the part of Lincoln’s life that this kind of keyhole narrative can most easily be integrated into historical realities. The young Lincoln rambled widely, living and working in several states and trying out several professions, giving any adept writer abundant opportunity to paint the landscape vividly and imaginatively and still remain in the context of the verifiable. Grahame-Smith convincingly puts words in his Fictional Lincoln’s mouth, and as he displays a fluid style that is often lacking in like-emulations, like when the diary recounts what Lincoln witnessed at a Slave auction:

 

"I saw a Negro girl of three or four clinging to her mother, confused as to why she was dressed in such clothes; why she had been scrubbed the night before; made to stand on this platform while men shouted numbers and waved pieces of paper in the air. Again, I wondered why a Creator who had dreamt such beauty would have slandered it with such evil.”

 

By this point in the narrative Lincoln has already allied himself with a group of not-so-evil Vampires who call themselves the “Union”– get it? -- against the other more powerful group who dominated Southern politics and society. His Political Career which would start not long after and was shaped by that association. On this is the foundation rests the contrasts that the story revels in, historical content vs. Horror-Movie scares and Comic-Book action scenes.

 

The Horror/Action content is fast-paced, hugely entraining, and often quite funny. In one episode, Lincoln, now a Attorney, is bruised in court with the loss of a Civil Suit; that evening he goes out on a Vampire hunt. To his surprise, it turns out that evening’s Monster was none other than his Client from earlier in the day. Just as they are about engage in their death duel, the Demoness hisses contemptuously that Lincoln better hope that he’s a better fighter than an Attorney.

 

Grahame-Smith’s historical fidelity grants his Hero a more interesting character arc than most Pulp Heroes. When this Fictional Lincoln, mimicking the real one, falls in love, marries, has children and enters Politics, he does something few action-Heroes ever do, but most men of accomplishment accept as an inevitability: he puts aside childish things (in this case, his axe) and creates a more stable and sustainable life, integrating himself into new venues, and ponders how he can apply the lessons of his youth to the realities of maturity.

 

This radical turn in the narrative allows this Pulp Novel to be shaped by more-complex-than-average relationships. He profoundly loves his wife, who is treated with a lot more respect here than in most dramatizations of Lincoln’s life, but whom he turns his back on her in her hour of greatest need: after losing a second child she spirals into mental instability, but by then his was President and the midst of the ultimate National Crisis. I also liked the handling of his long-rivalry, and occasional allegiance, with Stephen Douglas, who in most Lincoln Dramas is regulated to a single foot-note incident.

 

The Novel had leaned heavily on mano-a-mano combat up to this point, and as the more complex history unfolds, Grahame-Smith repeatedly interrupts it with more breathless action-episodes. During the build-up to the Civil War, the retired Vampire hunter accepts one last vital mission from his Union allies.

 

So, the Hero is reluctantly dragged out of retirement for one last vital mission...yeah, we all know how well those generally work out, don’t we?

 

This leads to a wild scene where Lincoln and his two assistant Vampire hunters, Joshua Speed and Jack Armstrong (both Historical Characters), are hopelessly trapped in a burning manor-house of a plantation, surrounded by an army of Vampires, while Jefferson Davis, in classic melodramatic Villain style, gives a smug speech about the superiority of his cravenness over Abe’s naive virtues. It would not have been out of place in the film “Django Unchained” (2012).

As entertaining as all this is, it also is evidence of the difficulties of taking story that was one thing and trying to mutate into another. This is demonstrated in even the number of pages the book devotes to this the phases of the history unfolding. A full 187 pages are required to get us to the year 1843 and the age of 37, so before Lincoln achieved any fame. After that, a mere 146 pages, more than a little rushed seeming, is left to get him into Congress, then the White House, guide the nation through the Civil War, and fall to an assassin’s bullet in 1965 at age 56 (by the way, John Wilkes Booth was a Vampire).

 

Graham-Smith, in making Vampires the primary drivers of the Slave Economy, and the secret force behind the South’s mad, headlong rush into war, has stumbled across a near perfect metaphor. Vampires, at least since Bram Stoker's "Dracula" (first published 1897), have represented hold-over Superstitions trying to keep the shadows deep and dark in the face of the light of reason and Modernity, and they are simultaneously the Aristocracy and the Parasite. They have been exploited to make political points not only in Fiction but Presidential campaign rhetoric (anyone remember the “Romney is a Vampire” TV ad (2012)?). The metaphor has rarely been utilized as forcefully as here, but unfortunately it wasn’t used to dig as deep as it could’ve. Having set the stage so deftly, Graham-Smith fails to utilize his fantasy to illuminate real themes in history as historical Fictions are generally expected to do.

 

One thing almost every Lincoln drama gets wrong is how slowly his positions on Slavery evolved. Though from the earliest he found Slavery morally repugnant, and his Abolitionist rhetoric was fiery in even his earliest political speeches, but even well into the Civil War his policies regarding the institution were in fact quite moderate (and from a 21st c. perspective, reprehensible). Preservation of the Union was his number one priority, freeing the Slaves was way down the list. It would not be much of a stretch to say he’d have been satisfied to institute a handful of reforms that maybe could’ve been utilized by others later, and that for most of his career it would’ve okay with him if helped the USA move towards the end of Slavery even if it was something he didn’t personally live to see.

 

First step in seeing someone as human is fully recognizing them as real. There’s little reason to think that black Slaves, who did move his heart when he saw them suffer from a distance, were ever close enough to him that he was forced to see them as real as his friends and associates, or even as real as his bitter enemies. There’s little or no record I’m aware of concerning substantive encounters between Lincoln and Blacks during his formative years in rural Kentucky. Working on a flat boat on the Mississippi, he wasn’t likely to be invited into the homes of those of Slave Owners, nor encounter the minority of freemen in his day-to-day labors. Though he married the daughter of a prominent Slave Owner, he was not close to his in-laws, and he and his wife settled in a free state. I’d wager that it’s not likely he had a conversation with a Black longer than ten words before went to Washington in 1846, maybe not until he entered the White House in 1861, and maybe even not even until his memorable meeting with Frederick Douglas in 1963 (which isn’t in this particular book, but should've been).

 

Moreover, Lincon was not a Liberal by today’s standards, he was a man of a time who would’ve been almost overwhelming intellectually challenging to conceive of Blacks as equally of the same species as Whites. He was quite articulate in expressing his belief that Blacks were inherently intellectually inferior. Lincoln’s evolution was Moral, not Intellectual, and a longer road that most dramatists don’t want to admit he had to travel, or that his abandonment of comfortable, if reprehensible, moderation on Abolition and his eventual Heroic embrace of a more righteous stand was something that we must admit was provoked to a large degree by the Confederate madness (the Emancipation Proclamation came three years into the Civil War).

 

“Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” doesn’t misrepresent his relationship with Slavery but after having built so a fine bridge of fantasy to explore this true subject, it sidesteps it rather than crossing.

 

The Novel is better in evoking the madness and hopeless of the Southern cause, but even here I find fault. We see the relentless spiral towards war through Lincoln’s eyes in the first-person entries. But Graham-Smith also availed himself of the third person omniscient, yet didn’t utilize it was it was most needed. It should’ve been said that the South had a smaller population, a limited industrial base, a poor railway system and significantly no cannon factories. Their strategy was to strike first in the months between the Election and Inauguration, dig in so that the Federal Government couldn’t respond, and that would be it. When Lincoln chose the course of military engagement, the South was doomed. Even to that last moment, hell, after that last moment, the South had so many other options, but they acted in with the kind of irrational absolutism that we now associate with only the maddest of despots or the presumptuousness of the Divine (read Supernatural) Right of Kings.

 

According to a 1973 study by economist Claudia Goldin, had the South ended the institution Slavery by buying and freeing all the Slaves, instead of going to war, it would’ve cost them about $2.7 billion in 1861 dollars. True, it is hard to imagine the political will to execute a plan could’ve ever been mustered, but what were the costs of turning their back any comprise or accommodation? On the Southern side alone, the most often cited figures are $1 billion in property destruction, $1.5 billion in loss of human capital, $767 million for war expenditures, and an appalling 258,000 dead young men. To this, Godwin added a net economic difference of $10 billion between an imaginary South without Rebellion vs. the one we got, in which wide regions wallowed in continuous Recession for about 80 years. This is the kind of clarifying extra that the Fictional Narrator Graham-Smith could’ve provided us with that the Fictional Diarist Lincoln couldn’t have been reasonably expected too.

 

And not for nothing, the Real Lincoln, who couldn’t have done Godwin’s math, wasn’t insensitive to the idea. In an 1862 letter Lincoln wrote, “Less than one half-day’s cost of this war would pay for all the Slaves in Delaware at $400 per head … [and] less than 87 days’ cost of the war would, at the same price, pay for all in Delaware, Maryland, District of Columbia, Kentucky and Missouri.” (This letter is not cited in this particular book.) In fact, the Federal government did buy-back the Slaves within the confines of the District of Columbia and the Slave States that didn't Secede (This also isn't cited in the book.)

 

Once the war starts, the Novel engages the reader mostly because of its effective and exciting compression of what actually happened, while the Vampire metaphor becomes under-exploited and explored, losing much of it bite (pardon the pun). Critic Lev Grossman put it well, “Once the connection is made, it feels obvious, and neither slavery nor vampirism reveals anything in particular about the other. One could imagine a richer, subtler treatment of the subject, in which the two horrors multiply each other rather than cancel each other out.”

 

Yet as Lincoln Fictions go, it has enormously more to say than most. Maybe it says something about our culture that deliberately ridiculous, the axe-wielding, vigilante Super-Hero towers most more easily respected works. Allegedly realistic Fictions were full of Myth, but I say those that are honest about being Myth-shaped can present a sharper picture.

 

One measure in how the Novel succeeds is revealed in the words of a withering critique of the film based on it (2012) Directed by Timur Bekmambetov. Historian Vernon Burton enjoyed the Novel but hated the film, and spoke volumes of the pitfalls of Fictions that prove incapable of grasping with the real Historical issues they grapple with (this quote from an article by Tierney Sneed):

 

“‘Slavery was our national sin,’ said Burton, who said the connection works in that ‘the nation sucked the blood out of Africans for its wealth.’ However, in posing Vampires as the villains behind the crime of Slavery, the Film risks ‘letting the South and the United States off,’ freeing it from blame for the practice.

“‘The Book did some clever things,’ said Burton. ‘I was excited to see the Movie. The Book had potential.’ He said the Film version was oversimplified, and he worried viewers would make too much of what he and other historians often call the ‘Oliver Stone school of history.’"

 

Sadly, Seth Grahame-Smith deserves some blame, he Authored the Screenplay to the Film that was so inferior to his Novel.