One of the best things that can be said of Nick Groom’s colossally smart The Vampire: A New History is that it gets the hellion out from under its humid cloud of melodramatic pining. ... at times, leads the book into ludicrousness as it struggles to make its way back to vampires ... It is a great relief to meet Groom’s vampire, still icy from the void and unburdened by the aesthetic of Gothic nightingale-lite.
[A] 200-page treatise is more cultural history than comprehensive chronicle ... Mr. Groom appears to have marinated himself in the vast literature of his subject, and The Vampire is an impressively learned work ... At times, readers of may feel themselves paddling hopelessly in a sea of trivia ... All parties owe Mr. Groom thanks for helping to explain the meaning of vampires—which is only fair, since vampires have worked so hard, for so long, to explain the meaning of us.
Points are all good, but do they need to be made quite as insistently and repetitively as they are here? The Vampire is academic to a fault ... One gets the sense that no piece of research has been allowed to go unmentioned: the bibliography runs to some twenty-five pages, the notes to forty. Groom sounds like an enthusiastic teacher – he is indeed a Professor of English in the University of Exeter – pursuing his pet topic through a series of interminable lectures, in which only the occasional gruesome nugget shakes awake the dozing student ... there is very little psychology here at all ... There is much to relish here...But these pleasing factoids are not enough in themselves to breathe life into this turgid corpse of a book. Groom wears his scholarship like a ball and chain. It takes some doing to make vampires dull. Yet, alas, this is exactly the feat he has managed.
