corrigan's Reviews (451)

I didn't think it was possible, but I might actually like this book better than I liked Devil in the White City. The increasing urgency of this book as the story develops, as well as the strange mix of familiarity and unfamiliarity with the events it describes make for an incredibly fascinating read. Larson has us listening in on the conversations and revelations that slowly transform the Dodds from a fairly clueless and optimistic American family reveling in life abroad, to the unwelcome harbingers of doom to a fairly clueless and optimistic American government.

In narrative consistency, Seth Grahame-Smith sometimes falters. In making plausible that Abraham Lincoln's abolitionist sympathies were born not simply of a belief in the equal humanity of blacks, but even more so of necessity to stop vampires from enslaving all mankind, he succeeds. Grahame-Smith drifts in and out of omniscience, at times reading his characters' thoughts and motives or relating dialogue of full conversations, despite the narrator's (his) knowledge of the events supposedly coming solely from the journals of Abraham Lincoln and other such documents. This is only mildly distracting, though. The story is compelling, and when he resists the temptation to guess at the characters' feelings, he manages to come close to replicating the voices of popular historians such as H.W. Brands and Erik Larson, making it at times hard to discern whether a particular passage is historical fact, or simply part of the vampire hunter narrative. This is what makes this completely fantastical story read as believable. Grahame-Smith uses vampires to explain why the bookish, introspective Lincoln would have chosen a life of political involvement, and how the Confederacy could have held up against the Union for so long given its comparatively meager numbers.