Following the success of his bestselling Pride and Prejudice and Zombies with another mélange of history and horror, Grahame-Smith inserts a grandiose and gratuitous struggle with vampires into Abraham Lincoln’s life. Lincoln learns at an early age that his mother was killed by a supernatural predator. This provokes his bloody but curiously undocumented lifelong vendetta against vampires and their slave-owning allies. The author’s decision to reduce slavery to a mere contrivance of the vampires is unfortunate bordering on repellent, but at least it does distract the reader from the central question of why the president never saw fit to inform the public of the supernatural menace. Grahame-Smith stitches hand-to-hand vampire combat into Lincoln’s documented life with competent prose that never quite manages to convince. (Mar.)

The latest literary experiment from the author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009). After striking gold with his gimmicky mash-up between Jane Austen and grindhouse horror, Grahame-Smith takes a stab at creating an original plot with this new historical aberration. The author picks a larger-than-life hero: the legendary 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. In his fictional introduction, the author claims to have received a visit from "Henry," a creepy young roustabout whose curiosity leads him to deliver to the writer Lincoln's lost diaries, detailing his life as a gifted vampire hunter. The fictional Grahame-Smith is instructed to compose a historical biography, resulting in a mimicked, formal study of the late president in the vein of Doris Kearns-Goodwin, infused with a macabre dose of gore. According to the book, when he's only nine, Lincoln's mother dies from a supernatural assault, passed off as milk sickness. From that moment, the future president vows: "I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America." Subsequently we find him earnestly decapitating America's vampires with his trusty ax. Not to be missed are Lincoln's trusty companions in his crusade against the undead, among them the president's real-life wrestling pal Jack Armstrong, and a New Orleans encounter with a gloomy, little-known writer, Edgar Poe, newly fascinated with stories of the undead. The book's grotesque joviality should be fun for those looking for it.

"Seth Grahame-Smith is an excellent writer whose prose raises Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter a step above others of its genre...[He] does such an excellent job blending the facts of Lincoln's life into the story that it is sometimes hard to determine fact from fiction...Suspenseful, and most readers will want to read it in one sitting."— Asbury Park Press

"Evocative...Grahame-Smith [is] a lively, fluent writer with a sharp sense of tone and pace."—TIME

"Thanks to P&P&Z, a delicious mutant book craze was born. But then opportunists infested the territory...It's nice to see plucky Grahame-Smith retake his turf."—Entertainment Weekly

"Not just the Lincoln biography we've all been waiting for. It's also the funniest, most action-packed and weirdly well-researched account of the Civil War you'll probably read in a long time. Grahame-Smith could be poised to become the Howard Zinn of vampire-related alterna-history."—Vanity Fair

"Grahame-Smith does an excellent job of capturing the spirit of this style of story-telling, mixing historically accurate anecdotes with entries from Lincoln's fictional secret journal, weaving the vampire elements into the story in a manner that's quite believable."—Wired

"Grahame-Smith does an excellent job of capturing the spirit of this style of story-telling, mixing historically accurate anecdotes with entries from Lincoln's fictional secret journal, weaving the vampire elements into the story in a manner that's quite believable."

"Not just the Lincoln biography we've all been waiting for. It's also the funniest, most action-packed and weirdly well-researched account of the Civil War you'll probably read in a long time. Grahame-Smith could be poised to become the Howard Zinn of vampire-related alterna-history."

"Thanks to P&P&Z, a delicious mutant book craze was born. But then opportunists infested the territory...It's nice to see plucky Grahame-Smith retake his turf."

"Evocative...Grahame-Smith [is] a lively, fluent writer with a sharp sense of tone and pace."

"Seth Grahame-Smith is an excellent writer whose prose raises Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter a step above others of its genre...[He] does such an excellent job blending the facts of Lincoln's life into the story that it is sometimes hard to determine fact from fiction...Suspenseful, and most readers will want to read it in one sitting."