This was an interesting book. Starting in the early 21st century, it goes backwards into history and mythology to try to explain the origins of the vampire. From misunderstanding decomposition to fear of plagues and pestilence to spiritual and religious beliefs, the author traces the evolution of the primitive living dead to the complex villain that is so well known today. It was a fascinating - though often macabre - journey. ( )

Vampire Forensics is an entertaining book filled with factoids that attempts to explore the history of vampires. Mark Collins Jenkins cites folklore, literary characters (e.g. Dracula), anthropological, archaeological, medical (e.g. rabies, plague victims, funerary practices) and other scientific research in his search for the origins of the vampire legends. The organizational structure of the book is somewhat erratic making the path to the origin of the vampire legend somewhat obscure. This is not a chronological history of any means. There is also very little real forensics work cited in this book, despite the title. In addition, the author never draws a firm conclusion and the book rather peters out. Despite these flaws, this book is a rather interesting collection of historical anecdotes and perceptions of the dead and not-so-dead.
( )

I did enjoy this book as pleasurable reading material so I am giving it a high rating. If you are after an academic account of the origins of vampire mythology, this book does not deliver, despite the interesting bibliography. The writing style is more suited to a series of magazine articles and is quite verbose and overly descriptive. Whilst this stops it from being too dry, it does detract from what the author is trying to say. There are many interesting anecdotes and snippets of folklore that are food for thought. Read if you are interested in vampires and are not after a scholarly review. I have used the bibliography to seek out a few interesting sounding reads. ( )

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. ( )