Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154877 in Books
• Published on: 1998-11-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 960 pages

Amazon.com
J. Gordon Melton has the credentials: he's a religious historian, author of 25 books about religion and vampires, president of the American chapter of the Transylvania Society of Dracula (founded in Bucharest, Romania), and chairman of the committee that put on Dracula '97: A Centennial Celebration in Los Angeles. The Vampire Book is meticulously researched and well organized. Included are an article on the cultural history of the vampire; a historical timeline; addresses of vampire societies all over the world; a 55-page filmography; vampires in plays, opera, and ballet; a 13-page list of vampire novels; and an extensive index. The A to Z entries, each with a short bibliography, include vampire lore in more than 30 different geographic regions and a comprehensive "who's who," and cover topics ranging from fingernails to sexuality, the Camarilla to Szekelys.

Midwest Book Review
The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead covers the historical, literary, mythological, biographical and popular aspects of one of the world's most mesmerizing subjects. Here from A-Z are definitions of terms, descriptions of places and biographies of famous vampires (both fictional and allegedly real) the actors who have portrayed them and the authors who have immortalized them. Readers will be further spellbound by descriptions of vampire appearances in different cultures and other topics (like sexuality) associated with vampires. Many of The Vampire Book's 120 illustrations are rare, never-before-published images from the file of the Vampire Studies society. A Map of Vampire Country depicts major sites associated with Dracula in Roumania. Three separate chronologies present the development of the vampire myth in history, in novels and through cinema.

Customer Reviews

Very interesting and Informative
Although I haven't read this entire Encyclopedia yet, I can say that it covers almost everything one can desire in researching vampires through history and pop culture/media. It touches upon many different theories, myths and beliefs of vampires and demonstrates how we see them past present and future. If you are fascinated by vampires and enjoy learning more about them and their prescence in the human world, I would recommend investing in this book.

Vampires Dictionary
When this book arrived at home, I found a big package, really I didn't expect such measures!. It is one of the most biggest and complete book i have about vampires (an I have more than 20).

There are more than 1000 definitions about vampire-terminology like stack,garlic, Bathory, Strigoi....All of them taken from classical novels like Dracula, Vampire of Polidori, Carmilla..., from Classical and Modern Vampire movies and also from anthropology and folklore.

Highly recommended.

still looking for a good book on vampires
If you don't know much about the subject, this is an ok book. If you want boring biographies of every author, actor and fictional character that ever had anything to do with vampires, you'll love it. If you were hoping to learn something new about vampires, TOO BAD! The author is obsessed with fictional portrayals of the vampire, and really doesn't know or care much about vampires. The research is very spotty- he somehow got hold of some good stuff about Malaysian vampires and padded the book by repeating it verbatim in various entries ad nauseam, but he ignored ALL the info available about Japanese vampires and assigned vampirism to a different monster instead. sheesh. As if that sort of laziness weren't bad enough, most of the folklore and historical information is presented without references-he's fond of quoting sources that he didn't bother to include in the bibliography, leaving the impression he got most of this stuff out of other books just as bad as this one. Too many trees died for this book, unfortunately.