Our Vampires, Ourselves (Nina Auerbach, Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995) is an astute and witty feminist reading of two hundred years of Anglo-American cultural history, revealing the constantly shifting fears underlying technological and sociopolitical change that the ever-mutating vampire archetype represents. Armed with an elegant writing style and wicked humour, Auerbach (John Welsh Centennial Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania) traces the shadowy vampire from early Romantic manifestations such as Lord Byron's fragmentary novel The Vampire (begun 1816), John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), through Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), which crystalised the archetype as a phenomenological form that has the power to transmit knowledge concerning human (and post-human) existence, to late twentieth century manifestations such as Kathryn Bigelow's elegistic western Near Dark (1987), and the lesbian vampires of Tony Scott's The Hunger (1983).

Few books deserve the 'landmark' accolade: this academic-level yet accessible study is one of them. (Its cultural deconstruction of vampires is comparable to Noel Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart [New York and London: Routledge, 1990] study of the wider horror genre.) On one level the text is a tour de force literary study (with extensive footnotes), Auerbach even manages to reinterpret hackneyed icons such as the Christopher Lee/Bela Lugosi film cycles in a new light, and unearth some rarely glimpsed gems along the way, replete with plenty of potential Greater Magic ritual imagery. On another level, the book's cultural subtext (particularly the later chapters dealing with post-1970s and Reagan/AIDS era manifestations) is mandatory reading for a thorough Lesser Magic understanding of the archetype's long-term effect on Western civilization.

Auerbach acknowledges the self-contained limits of an Anglo-American focus (since each foreign culture has its own vampires), but a reading of the McNally/Florescu text's repository of Romanian, German, and Russian myths will counterbalance Auerbach's book, since Slavic folklore was both the forerunner and source of the subsequent Romantic tradition, which established the archetype in the West.

Auerbach's final words are deeply stirring: "The reversibility of vampirism in 1980s movies . . . suggests that at the end of the twentieth century, vampirism is wearing down and the vampires need a long restorative sleep. They will awaken; they always have; as Stoker's Dracula boasted, time is on their side," (p192).