Vampire Forensics: Uncovering the Origins of an Enduring Legend Paperback – 19 April 2011

This is a well written and well researched book that would suit students of Gothic fiction as well as general readers. Jenkins basically attempts to try and ascertain where and how the vampire myth originated. He found that vampires were not the sexy but tormented creatures we are accustomed to reading about today. On the contrary, back in medieval times vampires were associated death, decay and sightings of vampires were usually more frequent when populations had experienced epidemics. Jenkins bases his conclusions on the back of archaeology and anthropology. He also uses literary texts to demonstrate how popular perceptions of the vampire figure have changed over time. I found this book to be a very informative but also entertaining read.

But very good

Brilliant to read, very light and entertaining while delivering a lot of very interesting information. Highly recommendable to anyone with an interest in Vampires and their legends, myths, and history!

This book was OK. But no more than that.If you want a well-written, coherent account of the origins of the vampire myth - or even a discussion of the various walking-corpsey-type myths available - then look elsewhere. You won't find it here.This book reads more like a blog-published-as-book - an accumulation of short pieces written on similar topics, and then published as a book. It's interesting to read, but if it had been more organised, it would have been a better book. Not only does it jump about in time, but also in geography and in myth-type. The author (or editor, or someone) would have been better to pick a method of classification and then stick with it.The book also gives quite a lot of direct quotes from other sources, which is not in itself bad, but it then fails to follow up by discussing them properly, or comparing them to other similar quotes. Also, many of these quotes don't seem to serve any purpose related to the stated topic of the book (i.e., the origin of the vampire legend) but appear to have been included only to titillate. Which leads back to the impression of blog-as-book; the whole book seems disjointed, as if the author just wrote it as a kind of macabre stream-of-consciousness, rather than as a credible work of non-fiction.Content-wise, it's interesting, but because Jenkins has tried to cover an awful lot of ground - geographically, temporally and mythically - in relatively few pages, he doesn't go into anything in any depth. It's like a coffee-table book, except if you put this on your coffee-table probably nobody would visit you ever again. This is the kind of book where you put it down and say to yourself "Now, where can I find a real book on the origin of the vampire legend?"Final verdict?1. Disorganised.2. Superficial.3. Easy enough to read.4. Does not require any prior knowledge of the subject matter (in fact, if you have prior knowledge, you probably won't find anything new in this book.Do I regret reading it? No, oddly enough. I knew most of the contents already, but there were a few bits and pieces here and there that were new.Would I recommend it? Not to anyone with a serious interest in vampires, but possibly to someone looking for a reasonably light and entertaining overview of post-death superstitions.

Mostly rehashes of previous materials and does not uncover the roots and history of where some of hte stories come from. Disappointing.

Bought this as a gift for someone who loves vampires. Hope they enjoy it.