This is a lively book that takes the reader on a bouncing ramble through vampires and Dracula in popular culture. It presents a number of portraits of individuals and situations, rather than making a single cohesive argument, and sometimes the connections between one profile (a parade in Philadelphia, a former amusement park attraction, visits with Jeanne Youngson and J. Gordon Melton, and so on) and the next are made in a few rather perfunctory sentences. But the descriptions of Bibeau's two trips to Romania are entertaining and enlightening. The chapters about the gaming convention and the real life vampiric community are also done quite well. I wish Bibeau had found more worthy subjects from the vampiric community to interview--he (and his readers) would have learned a lot more, and I don't mean that in a snide way. Bibeau leaves a lot unexplained about his motivations for choosing the people, events and media that he highlights, so it's possible Jonathon Sharkey and Sebastiaan Todd were the only people who would talk to him that he could find within his deadline.
In magazine article style, each chapter hits the ground running and then catches the reader up on the fly, giving the narrative a somewhat breathless velocity and numerous associative digressions. There are limitations to the method Bibeau employs to explore his theme. It's impossible, for example, to really understand what LARPing means to the people for whom it is a way of life, just by sitting in on sessions at a single weekend gaming convention. Interviewing high-profile attention-seekers tells the reader very little of substance about what the real vampiric community and its members think and experience, and *Sundays With Vlad* tells us what it's like to visit Romania but not what it's like to be a Romanian. The book's subtitle is "from Pennsylvania to Transylvania, one man's quest to live in the world of the undead," but Bibeau never comes close to occupying that world--he's just a tourist. Still, the tourist travelogue has a long pedigree in the field of vampirology (that's all that de Tournefort's book is, after all) and Bibeau never condescends to his topic or the people he interviews. *Sundays With Vlad* has no pretensions to be anything other than it is.
Unfortunately, the text is marred by numerous typos and errors, which probably should be blamed on the editor and publisher rather than the author. Perhaps these can be corrected before the next printing.
In Sundays with Vlad, author Paul Bibeau takes a (mostly) light-hearted look at Count Dracula, both the historical figure and the vampire of legend. He is interested particularly in the relationship between the two, how Vlad the Wallachian prince--an ill-starred fellow who worked through his issues "by killing a whole mess of people"--became tied up with the blood-sucking fiend of creature features and cereal boxes. Bibeau explores the topic of vampirism from a number of different angles, some of them rather surprising. He writes, for example, about his trips to Romania, where he visited the remains of the historical Vlad's castle and traced the journey of Bram Stoker's character Jonathan Harker. No surprise there. But there are also chapters on an old attraction on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, Castle Dracula, which burned down in 2002. And Bibeau actually interviews the woman who came up with the names for General Mills's pair of monster cereals, Frankenberry and Count Chocula. (This, as it happens, is Laura Levine, the author of the Jaine Austen Mysteries.) Bibeau also explores the world of modern-day "vampires"--from Dungeons and Dragons-type roll players to consenting adults who really do suck one another's blood to people who've crossed the line from bizarre to really dangerous. In the end he ties it all up as a study in globalism: Westerners usurped the historical Vlad and turned him into a fictional character, after which he became an endlessly malleable, international cultural icon.
Sundays with Vlad begins very well, with stories of the genesis of the author's early interest in monsters and his honeymoon in Romania:
"As we moved deeper into eastern Europe, the buildings got flimsier and the toilet paper got harsher. In Prague, the toilet paper seemed like the utility-grade stuff you'd use in your college dorm, and most of the buildings of Prague seemed sturdy and well-kept. Hungary's offices and apartments seemed danker and more prone to collapse, but its TP was hardy and unrelenting as a Magyar horde. And nothing could prepare us for Romania."
Bibeau is frequently very funny, but not all of his humor works, and sometimes the narrative get a bit boring: the author is wont to follow tangents--on Wildwood, New Jersey, on Romanian beer--that don't always merit the telling. But Sundays with Vlad is on the whole an interesting read, and not a little disturbing: there are some very strange people out there doing some very strange things. It's almost enough to give vampires a bad name.
-- Debra Hamel
