Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man's Quest to Live in the World of the Undead
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Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 398.45
EAN: 9780307352781
ISBN: 0307352781
Label: Three Rivers Press
Manufacturer: Three Rivers Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2007-10-02
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Release Date: 2007-10-02
Studio: Three Rivers Press
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Needs a Revised Edition
Comment: Fully agreeing with earlier reviewers that Bibeau is a witty and clever writer, his disjointed travelogue and discombobulated anecdotes become tedious after the first 100 pages. His first-hand interviews and hands-on research are commendable. But he frequently jumps topics -- and for lengthy stretches at that. This hyperlinked-style of storytelling meanders too much. Also, nitpicking here, the spelling, punctuation and word confusion (weather v. whether) should have been edited out by the time a book hits paperback. Maybe Bibeau will tighten and rewrite a better book on this fascinating topic.
Customer Rating:
Summary: just OK
Comment: Paul Bibeau is a very funny, very engaging writer. That's what saved this book from 2 stars - or even 1.
His problems come with the particular topics he chooses. Some - for example, the trips to Romania - are right on target. Others - like the defunct Dracula-themed amusement park in Wildwood, NJ - just leave the reader bored and hoping the next chapter covers something a little more a propos. And some of his digressions (like his diatribe against some guy at the Bucharest Business Week) just leave you scratching your head and wondering what happened to the editor.
Other failings include no overarching theme (he tries to tie globalism into it all, but fails miserably) and the lack of any real, concerted research (it reads more like he simply tied together a bunch of light magazine articles together).
All in all, I'd recommend The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula instead. Still, Bibeau is an excellent, very funny writer (think Bill Bryson). He just needs a better topic and a lot more structure.
Customer Rating:
Summary: If you're a geek, you must read this book
Comment: Simply put, this book is a testament to what it means to grow up a geek and pursue some aspect of that as an adult. Bibeau's humor is cynical, charming, relateable and right-on-the-mark. You really have to have a healthy sense of humor about yourself and any interests you have in anything sci fi, fantasy, or yes, vampires and vampire subcultures. I really can't recommend this book enough and again, if you're like me and grew up as a "suburban geek," then you'll get pretty much what he's talking about in this book. Seriously, buy it and read it today.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Elvira can bite me anytime!
Comment: "Leering at me from across the canyon of merchandise at the Wal-Mart Supercenter is a giant inflatable lawn statue of Mickey Mouse dressed in a tuxedo and velvet cape with a widow's peak and tiny, somehow cute fangs poking out of his mouth ... Above all in the West, the Dracula industry is about change. We take the gripping image and tweak it until it becomes the best product it can possibly be. No one wants a lawn statue of a bloodthirsty medieval prince or a dated Hungarian actor ... They want Mickey." - Author Paul Bibeau in SUNDAYS WITH VLAD.
In SUNDAYS WITH VLAD (and Monday through Saturday too, for that matter), author Bibeau sets out to discover everything vampyrish (is that a word?) from the mainstream (Halloween vampire costumes) to the eccentric (Jonathan "the Impaler" Sharkey who ran for Minnesota governor in 2006) to the way-out-there (those who literally drink blood).
Paul is at his narrative best and most hilarious when he's traveling outside the United States, i.e. in the first and second-to-last chapters. In the former, he recounts that 3-day part of his 1999 honeymoon spent seeking the historical Vlad the Impaler in the Romanian province of Wallachia, at the end of which time he and his new bride, Anne, were prepared to buy an airplane ticket to anywhere just to get out of the "godforsaken crapheap". (Perhaps it was the infestations of beggars and feral dogs that took the romance out of the occasion.) In the latter, seven years later and the wife having opted to stay at home, Bibeau travels back to Romania and its province of Transylvania to retrace the fictional Jonathan Harker's route (in Bram Stoker's Dracula (Enriched Classics Series)) to Count Dracula's fictional castle. In this case, homesickness, bad roads, and anarchic local drivers seem to be the chief perils.
In between, in chapters that range from mildly to not at all amusing, Paul examines the Dracula/vampire fascination in the West, from films to clubs to swinger groups to killers to music to amusement park funhouses to consumer products to museums to live-action-role game playing. At one point, Bibeau mentions seeing an example of the anti-vampire kits that were ostensibly available at hotel front desks to Victorian-era travelers traipsing through Eastern Europe, but, in a major omission, he doesn't describe the kit's contents. Garlic, crucifix, holy water, mirror, and sharpened stake, perhaps? Also, he makes almost no reference to my personal favorite American icon and resident of my most fevered dreams, Elvira Mistress of the Dark.
Because the humor in SUNDAYS WITH VLAD is so inconsistent and the subject matter sometimes poorly chosen, I'm awarding a generous 4 stars, and that because of the two chapters set in Romania that are, by themselves, worth the price of the book. It's important to realize that the Romanians themselves, badly in need of tourist dollars, have pretty much declined to capitalize on the Dracula legend because there's little to no connection between the fictional character, a monument to Western kitsch and imagination, and Vlad the Impaler, a national hero for his opposition to the Turks. It would be like building a theme park celebrating George Washington the werewolf.
My reservations aside, SUNDAYS WITH VLAD will be considered essential reading by any aficionado of the blood sucking tradition.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A light and entertaining read
Comment: 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.
Unfortunately, the text is marred by numerous typos and errors, which probably should be blamed on the editor and publisher rather than the author. Perhaps these can be corrected before the next printing.
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