I’m very pleased to share this email received from a Princeton University Press Publicity Associate:
I hope you’re having a great week. I am getting in touch to send you details for Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World which we are publishing on 9th September 2025.
Killing the Dead offers a global history of “vampire epidemics” in ancient Mesopotamia, China, Eastern Europe, the African diaspora and beyond. Medieval historian and archaeologist John Blair likens the waves of hysteria over what he calls “the dangerous dead” to witch hunts, which appear far more often in the historical record and are generally understood as reactions to rapid socioeconomic, religious and cultural change in a particular society. Blair argues that corpse-killing—a surefire way to complete an unfinished death ritual and return the revenant to the realm of the dead—fulfills a similar function: to restore cosmic harmony and keep the living with the living, and the dead with the dead. Killing the Dead is an archaeological, anthropological, and psychological analysis of corpse-killing rituals across the inhabited world, from pre-Christian times up to the twenty-first century. This book is a corrective to the vampire archetype popularized in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The vampires of Killing the Dead are not the charming and seductive bloodsucking elites of the Gothic period; rather, they are flesh-and-blood proxies for human anxieties about the barrier between life and death.1
I knew John was working on a book, so this was a pleasant surprise.
Some of you may know John from his appearance in “Vampire Legend,” the season 15, episode 1 of Secrets of the Dead (aired October 27, 2015, on PBS). But I know him best from “The Dangerous Dead in Early Medieval England,” his contribution to a book on Early Medieval studies.2 If you can find it, read it.
John’s book is slated for release on September 9th. I’m currently in the process of securing a reviewer who’ll be critiquing the book for our Journal of Vampire Studies. I have three candidates in mind. Let’s see what happens.
“Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World” is available for pre-order.
