From the moment I heard of the existence of such a book as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I knew I must own it. And own it – and read it – I did. It’s fantastic (if you haven’t read it, it’s exactly what it sounds like).
So when I heard that Mr. Grahame Smith had discovered the secret diaries of none other than our beloved 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, diaries that reveal the shocking and bloody truth of our nation’s debt to and relationship with vampires, I was immediately sold.
The book is a quick read, written in biographical style with excerpts from Lincoln’s diaries woven throughout. Going into the book, I knew little of Lincoln’s actual history: he’d been raised in a log cabin, had no formal education, was a lawyer, married Mary Todd, lost sons to disease. Oh yeah, and became president and ended slavery.
But knowing just the bare-bones sketch of Lincoln’s life was more than enough for me to enjoy this revised romp through American history. Grahame-Smith’s Lincoln is a brash, arrogant young man who gradually learns to temper the energies of his youth with the wisdom of age. He and his family suffer greatly because of his quest to rid America of the scourge of Vampirism, and through it all, we watch as Lincoln becomes the stuff of legends.
Grahame-Smith toys not-so-subtly with the connection between slavery and vampirism (one person living off the blood of another), but it doesn’t detract from the book. It’s hard to imagine someone being ‘preachy’ about the evils of slavery (or Vampirism for that matter. Or Twilight), so the moralizing in the book isn’t off-putting in any way.
