Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man's Quest to Live in the World of the Undead

by Paul Bibeau

This is a lively book that takes the reader on a bouncing ramble through vampires and Dracula in popular culture. It presents a number of portraits of individuals and situations, rather than making a single cohesive argument, and sometimes the connections between one profile (a parade in Philadelphia, a former amusement park attraction, visits with Jeanne Youngson and J. Gordon Melton, and so on) and the next are made in a few rather perfunctory sentences. But the descriptions of Bibeau's two trips to Romania are entertaining and enlightening. The chapters about the gaming convention and the real life vampiric community are also done quite well. I wish Bibeau had found more worthy subjects from the vampiric community to interview--he (and his readers) would have learned a lot more, and I don't mean that in a snide way. Bibeau leaves a lot unexplained about his motivations for choosing the people, events and media that he highlights, so it's possible Jonathon Sharkey and Sebastiaan Todd were the only people who would talk to him that he could find within his deadline.

In magazine article style, each chapter hits the ground running and then catches the reader up on the fly, giving the narrative a somewhat breathless velocity and numerous associative digressions. There are limitations to the method Bibeau employs to explore his theme. It's impossible, for example, to really understand what LARPing means to the people for whom it is a way of life, just by sitting in on sessions at a single weekend gaming convention. Interviewing high-profile attention-seekers tells the reader very little of substance about what the real vampiric community and its members think and experience, and *Sundays With Vlad* tells us what it's like to visit Romania but not what it's like to be a Romanian. The book's subtitle is "from Pennsylvania to Transylvania, one man's quest to live in the world of the undead," but Bibeau never comes close to occupying that world--he's just a tourist. Still, the tourist travelogue has a long pedigree in the field of vampirology (that's all that de Tournefort's book is, after all) and Bibeau never condescends to his topic or the people he interviews. *Sundays With Vlad* has no pretensions to be anything other than it is.

Softbound Three Rivers Press (October 2, 2007)

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