Wondering why I hadn’t received any notifications from the post office for a while, I stopped by today to see if anything was waiting for me. Fortunately, there was.
The first was Journal of Dracula Studies, no. 26 (2024). The journal is issued to members of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula (I’ve been one for many years). It is one of the benefits of joining the society. If you would like to join it, visit https://www.kutztown.edu/academics/colleges-and-departments/liberal-arts-and-sciences/departments/english/journal-of-dracula-studies.html for information.
That was the item recovered from my mailbox. I had to go inside the post office to get the other, which turned out to be a copy of Michael E. Bell’s Vampire’s Grasp: The Hidden History of Consumption in New England (2024).
It was sent by the Warren County Historical Society. They published the book under their imprint, Warren History Press. It is intended to aid my edits for a review of Bell’s book to be published in the next volume of Journal of Vampire Studies.
Full disclosure, I made extensive notes on the manuscript—as alluded to in the book’s acknowledgments:
Further disclosure: Bell is a member of the Journal of Vampire Studies Advisory Board. Our connection also goes back further. When I went to Texas in 2015, he generously let me crash at his place for a few days.1
He also wrote “New England Vampires as Local Variants of a Belief Tradition” for Journal of Vampire Studies, vol. 1, no. 2.
Long story short, Bell is the expert on New England vampirism. His previous book on the subject, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001), received the 2002 Lord Ruthven Award for Non-Fiction.
To get your copy of Vampire’s Grasp, visit https://www.wcnyhs.org/publications/.
- See Anthony Hogg, “Vampire Studies Symposium 2015: The ‘Lost’ Footage,” The Vampirologist (blog), December 8, 2017, https://thevampirologist.wordpress.com/2017/12/08/vampire-studies-symposium-2015-the-lost-footage/, for more info on my visit to the Lone Star State. ↩︎
Corrections
March 9, 2025
I mistakenly referred to the main title of Bell’s book as The Vampire’s Grasp instead of Vampire’s Grasp. The post and associated article tag have been updated accordingly.
