The Tale of the Living Vampyre

New Directions in Vampire Studies

Kevin Dodd

Universitas Press 2021

Pb, 260pp, £25, ISBN 9781988963327

Kevin Dodd is a retired university teacher of religious studies. This book is a monument to his intriguing side hustle: an obsession with vampire stories. It is published by the small Universitas Press in Montreal and may well slip through the cracks, which would be a shame as it consolidates a colossal amount of scholarship.

Rather in the manner of that old devil Montague

Summers and his raids on the archives – but with considerably more rigour – Dodd’s opening chapters accumulate detailed records of Norse aptrangar (“again-walkers”, physical returns of the dead), mediæval revenants and the slow morphing of predatory winged demons into vampire bats. This section is largely a steady accumulation, fastidiously if eccentrically taxonomised, and with a marked unwillingness to interpret or suggest much about the bigger theological frame. This can be a little frustrating, but ample notes point to more expansive scholars.

My frustration grew more overt when Dodd arrives at the 19thcentury vampire of modern myth and literature. He digs into the question of gender and sexuality (and even has a chapter on the trans vampire), but he often resists contemporary readings as over-interpretations, perhaps missing the point that queer readings are precisely about actively queering older vampire tales. Dodd feels often quite removed from the towering stacks of the scholarly vampire archive that has emerged in the last 40 years. These feel less “new directions” than solid old paths of empirical accumulation. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

The strength of the book all lies in the source material, particularly from the pre-modern world, that has been collected here. I will be snacking off bites of these sources for a long time to come.

Roger Luckhurst

★★★