Vampires Today: The Truth about Modern Vampirism by Joseph Laycock

Recommended reading on the Vampire Communityby TwoWeeksTillPayday

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July 05, 2009: Due in part to the growth of the community on the Internet, and in part to the recent popularity of vampire fiction, there has been a determined upswing in interest in the Vampire Community on the part of mainstream culture. However, until this book, there has been a dearth of accurate, scholarly information about it. In this sense, the public has really lucked out with Joseph Laycock's "Vampries Today;" this is a solid work of scholarship, it's smart and informed, and makes its arguments skillfully. The writing is appropriate for a scholarly and academic audience, but accessible enough to appeal to a mainstream, general audience. This is not an easy trick, but Laycock pulls it off well enough that this title will be equally at home on the Barnes and Noble bookshelf or in the stacks of your university's library. "Vampires Today" is informed by solid research, and is presented to the reader in a way that will shed light on the vampire fiction phenomenon and the Vampire Community alike.

Joseph Laycock did what no academic researcher before had really bothered to do - he studied the Vampire Community as if it were any other subcultural group. He researched the Community first-hand, he met with many representatives from the diverse sub-cultures within the Community, and he applied existing social and philosophical theory to what he found. Many previous works have taken the Vampire Community as an anomaly, and then attempted to explain why self-identified vampires were pathological, delusional, or dangerous -- outliers in an otherwise orderly world. Laycock has taken the Vampire Community as a working part of the greater society that its members participate in, and used it to explain how the Vampire Community is a product of, even a function of, mainstream society's ideas about self and identity.

Several chapters are devoted to sorting out the problems that researchers traditionally have in understanding the Vampire Community. Laycock neatly dismantles almost thirty years of spurious psychological, psychiatric, religious, and medical "explanations" of vampirism. In their place, he offers a thorough exploration of the internal diversity of the Vampire Community, key distinctions by which to understand the Community, based on the Vampire Community's own terms and analyses. He uses the accounts given by real vampires to provide an explanation of vampirism, not as a cult, a delusion or a psychopathology, not as a "new religious movement" or monolithic rejection of mainstream spiritual values, but as an "identity group," one option among many, which individuals in modern Western society use to construct their selves.

"Vampires Today" covers every aspect of why the Vampire Community is difficult for researchers to understand, it dismantles faulty thinking about the Vampire Community and about the phenomenon of modern vampirism, and it uses attentive research to provide the reader a framework by which to understand not only the vampire identity, but also the way identity and self-narrative function in our society in general. "Vampires Today" can inform the reader about vampirism, but it also spells out what vampires can offer the mainstream: the technology of self-exploration, and the processes of constructing identity out of self-discovery, meaning out of metaphor, and community out of shared experience.

I Also Recommend: Vampires in Their Own Words.