Received my copy of Brad Steiger's Real Vampires, Night Stalkers, and Creatures from the Darkside today.I ordered it from a seller on eBay and it was one of the items on my Amazon Wishlist.
And, I gotta say, I was a tad...disappointed.
Not by the content of the book itself. Haven't had a chance to read it yet. No, I'm talking page length. You see, the book's Amazon listing credits it with 400 pages. The book's publisher, Visible Ink Press (VIP), says it contains 300 pages.
How many does it actually have?
A measly 287.
Also, somewhat bizarrely (at least, to me), the copyright date of the book is 2010. Both its Amazon and VIP listing note its publication date as September 2009. Whether this means you can plagiarise huge chunks of it willy-nilly till next year, remains to be seen.
I've e-mailed VIP about this page length and copyright date anomaly and eagerly await their reply.
I'm trying to learn more about real vampires right now so I can separate reality from fiction. So many vampire wannabes have stepped out into the media but I think they're all posers still. It would be incredible to find the real thing.
ReplyDeleteHi Vampire,
ReplyDeleteIt would largely hinge on what exactly you think a "real vampire" is.
It's true a lot of "posers" as you call them, claim to be the real deal, by virtue of their drinking of blood or life force from their donors (or victims. heh heh).
By strict definition, however, they certainly aren't vampires.
The vampires depicted in film and fictional literature aren't representations of "the real thing" either. They're products of their respective author/filmmaker's imaginations.
If you want to get closer to the "source", then you'd be looking at the vampires of folklore. However, they're largely believed not to exist. After all, we're talking about revivified, bloodsucking corpses here.
Nonetheless, certain authors have made their cases for their alleged existence like Johann Heinrich Zopf, Montague Summers and more recently, Tom Slemen and Brad Steiger.
What is your interpretation of a "real vampire", exactly?