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[dust jacket flap] HAS MICHAEL E. BELL DISCOVERED THE REMNANTS OF A GHOULISH SUPERSTITION OR A REASONED ATTEMPT TO VANQUISH A TERRIBLE PLAGUE? Close
your eyes and imagine a vampire: Your mind's eye may conjure up Count
Dracula with bared teeth and a shiny tuxedo. But, another kind of vampire
was believed to live in rural New England long ago. Author and folklorist
Michel E.Bell has spent twenty years pursuing this forgotten vampire
tradition. His discoveries will surprise and enthrall skeptics, believers
and all readers of this engaging book. For Bell, it all began in 1981
when rural Rhode Islander Everett Peck related a story passed down through
generations of his family. In 1892, months after young Mercy Brown succumbed
to tuberculosis, her body was exhumed from a local graveyard. Relatives
cut out her heart, burned it on a nearby rock, and fed the ashes to
her dying brother, hoping to cure him of the wasting disease. They feared
that Mercy had become a vampire, sapping her sibling's vitality to provide
sustenance for her spectral existence. Or, had she become a scapegoat,
blamed for the baffling affliction ravaging her family. While such writers
as H.P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, and Amy Lowell drew on portions
of the tradition in their writings, Bell captures this tale in its entirety
for the first time. He takes readers on the road with him, visiting
legend trippers and outspoken skeptics, age-old graveyards and small
town museums. With humor, insight, and sympathy, he uncovers story upon
story of dying men, women, and children who believed they were food
for the dead [back cover] JOIN MICHAEL E. BELL IN HIS DISCOVERY OF A STARTLING CUSTOM "I hated to admit, even to myself, that I was excited by the prospect of interviewing Lewis Everett Peck, an Exeter, Rhode Island farmer and descendant of Mercy Brown, whom I would soon discover probably was the last person exhumed as a vampire in America. I had been a folklorist for more than a decade and had hundreds of interviews under my belt, but no one had ever told me a vampire story based on personal experience. Of course, like most modern Americans, I have a familiar, comfortable relationship with vampires. But these are fictional vampires. Their existence requires us to suspend our disbelief, whether we're watching a movie, reading a book, or looking at an ad for beer or batteries. Everett was going to tell me about a vampire who actually existed--a kin relation, no less--not some cardboard cutout, B-movie actor, or figment of an author's imagination." Courtesy of Carroll & Graf Publishers |
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