Thursday 1 December 2011

Upcoming books

It's been a while since I've taken a look at 'Upcoming books on vampires', so let's see what we're dealing with in the coming months. If you're a vampire fiction aficionado, note that my coverage of 'Upcoming books' concerns non-fiction works. Publication dates are also subject to change.



If I was to summarise the general themes of non-fiction vampire works coming in the new year, I'd say occult and film.

We start with Leo Ruickbie's A brief guide to the supernatural: ghosts, vampires and the paranormal (16 February 2012). Ruickbie 'is an historian and sociologist of magic, witchcraft and Wicca.'

Red Wheel/Weiser
For something explicitly magical, we have Father Sebastiaan's Vampire magick: the grimoire of the Living Vampire (1 March 2012), a 'companion volume' to Vampyre Sanguinomicon: the lexicon of the Living Vampire (2010).

For those not-in-the-know, a grimoire 'is a textbook of magic. Such books typically include instructions on how to create magical objects like talismans and amulets, how to perform magical spells, charms and divination and also how to summon or invoke supernatural entities such as angels, spirits, and demons.'

The pseudo-archaic tone is enhanced with 'magick', 'an Early Modern English spelling for magic'—but was also used by infamous occultist, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), to 'differentiate the occult from stage magic'—and vampyre, for that matter, which is (spoiler alert!) merely an archaic rendering of vampire.

As to film, Columbia University Press will be publishing Jeffrey Weinstock's The vampire film: undead cinema in April 2012; while I.B. Tauris will release Screening the undead: vampires and zombies in film and television by Leon Hunt, Sharon Lockyer and Milly Williamson on 1 December 2012.

Williamson may be familiar to some readers through her 2005 book, The lure of the vampire: gender, fiction and fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy.

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