Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today [Mass Market Paperback]

A vast chunk of the book is taken up with incredibly dull accounts of Ramsland's own fascination with vampires in books and films; interviews with sad characters who seem (to me anyway) to just want a tame listening-device to tell their sexual fantasies to; and a complete blind hero-worship of Anne Rice. The book fails on all these levels. I've seen far better written analysis of the horror culture elsewhere (Stephen King's "Danse Macabre" still stands out, even though he wrote it over 20 years ago), and Ramsland doesn't exactly seem like someone over-adventurous in their reading matter! There is nothing in her analysis of our ongoing fascination with the vampire legend that hasn't been said a hundred times before.

The interviews with self-confessed vampires sound at best pathetic, and at worst, deeply dodgy. In fact at worst it can read like the confessions of a dirty-old-man-in-a-raincoat variety ... and we're spared no detail on any of this.

Ramsland constantly questions why the vampire cult has grown so much in the past 15 years, as though implying there's something deeply profound about all this, when all it is is people being inspired by the rash of big-budget glossy vampire flicks that have appeared in recent years, plus a touch of Buffy, and the influence of her great hero, Anne Rice, who has made what was a dark legend look sensual and alluring. It's Ramsland's slavish adoration of Rice that is hard to swallow, although admittedly it's extremely hard to talk about the current fascination with vampires without bringing her into it.

But what struck me most was a shoulder-shrugging reaction of "so what?" to all this. There can be a very dark element to the vampire cult, after all we've seen that with real-life vampire-inspired murders in Britain in recent years, and the fact that some people do see the vampire cult as a means to live out some very disturbing sexual fantasies, and so yes, there IS a thought-provoking book to be written on this subject. But sadly this isn't it. For all her trumpeting about being a trained philosopher etc, Ramsland simply comes across as too lightweight to tackle a subject as darkly psychological as that. She's no Colin Wilson for instance.

Instead Ramsland gives us nothing very much, and the whole stuff of people filing down their teeth, putting on dark contact lenses, and sleeping by day seemed distinctly old hat. In fact, if this book is right, I was quite amazed how in some areas of the States it doesn't seem to take much to get a shocked reaction out of people! One young girl Ramsland interviews claims she shocked people by wearing a lot of black clothing, and a t-shirt with "Want Blood" on it. I live in a sleepy small town in south Oxfordshire, and even here you'd have to do a damn sight more than that to get a stunned reaction out of people! What utter nonsense!