Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
by Seth Grahame-Smith (read by Scott Holtz)
Hachette
(audiobook)

Seth Grahame-Smith is the idiot/genius behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - the mash-up of Jane Austen and flesh-eating members of the undead. Having sold a couple of million copies of this fun but pointless remix, Grahame-Smith returned with the even more lucrative Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter - now a movie starring Benjamin Walker. Unlike his debut, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is an original story (kind of) that works hard via parody and pastiche to seem old-fashioned. Grahame-Smith employs letters, a journal, and some fairly creditable impersonations of 19th-century prose to tell his silly tale: 'I stood over the miserable bird for what seemed a twelvemonth, pleading with God to make its wings fall silent.' This is Abe Lincoln recalling his horror at killing an innocent creature years after the event. Having learned that his mother was murdered by a vampire, Lincoln fuses politics with hunting bloodsuckers, helped by Edgar Allan Poe among others. Scott Holtz reads with a dead-pan tone that, while apt, does little for Grahame-Smith's otherwise lively piece of pulp.