Abraham Lincoln Fights Vampires

”While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for reuniting the North with the South and abolishing slavery from our country, no one has ever known about his valiant fight against America’s vampires or his earnest decapitating of them with his trusty axÉuntil now,“ said the press notes about Seth-Grahame Smith’s novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which was released March 2.

On the front cover, Lincoln is dressed in a suit and a long coat, a picture we are all familiar with. But on his coat is a smeared, bloody handprint. Behind him is an even bloodier mess, as if some sort of massacre had happened. Flip the book over and you see Lincoln holding an axe covered in blood, and Lincoln holds the hand of an unfortunate vampire.

For this novel, Smith has prepared himself for outrage from historians and Lincoln fans. But he has done his research, and he has written the novel according to Lincoln’s life. The novel is written as a kind of presidential biography, as David McCullough (1776) would’ve written. But the events of the president’s life have been repositioned and rearranged to correspond with the myth of Lincoln’s revenge toward the walking dead.

In this book, instead of Lincoln’s mother dying from milk sickness when he was only 9 years old, his mother’s death came by the hang, or fangs, of a bloodthirsty vampire. Now, like a typical comic book avenger, Lincoln is furious and has vowed to kill and eliminate every existing vampire he can find. Oh, and John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s nemesis and murderer, is supposedly a vampire as well.

It all sounds ludicrous, and it is, but the facts all seem to align with reality. In a newsletter from the Lincoln Presidential Library, writer Zach Baliva calls the book ”perfectly preposterous,“ even though Smith sticks to the facts of Lincoln's life. The basics are all there; Smith just adds ”some fangs, some garlic and maybe a few wooden stakes,“ according to Baliva.

Grand Central publishing has signed a two-book contract with Seth-Grahame Smith for half a million dollars. The editor who acquired this contract with Smith says, ”I wouldn’t say anyone ever single-handedly created anything (unless maybe they were in complete isolation for their entire lives and then suddenly invented Velcro or something) but I do think that Seth has tapped a vein here.“

Seth Grahame-Smith is also the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an instant classic that was popular with many Jane Austen fans as well as with people who hate her writing.

Even though historians will be infuriated by the addition of fangs and gore to the life of the great Abraham Lincoln, this is not the first time Lincoln’s life and role in history has been tampered with. ”Star Trek“ did an episode where Kirk and Spock met our 15th president in outer space. There was also a time when Lincoln’s picture, obviously tampered with, revealed an ”old photograph“ that depicted Lincoln as a woman. This, of course, was on the cover of a trustworthy tabloid magazine.

It’s obvious Smith is doing this all for gags. The novel has been arranged for laughs and nothing more. Nothing in its 336 pages is disrespectful to this great president, only mythical. Maybe this will bring forth other weird tales -- like Einstein being a paranormal investigator or Franklin D. Roosevelt being Lord Voldemort. (That’s not entirely far off, actually).