ANOTHER TAKE on Abraham Lincoln, this time with a bite, hits bookshelves in March.
Seth Grahame-Smith follows the formula used in his best-selling "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" -- a "Jane Austen-meets-the-undead" tale -- and weaves together accurate historical detail and classical literature with tales of the undead in "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter."
David Blanchette, communications coordinator for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, hopes the book's success mirrors "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," which reached No. 3 on the New York Times Bestseller List in 2009 and is being made into a feature film starring Natalie Portman.
"We look on this as an opportunity to promote Lincoln," Blanchette said. "This could reach an entirely different audience that normally would not consider going to a presidential library or museum. We're very glad to be able to take advantage of it."
Vampires actually are a good fit for the president who was fascinated by macabre literature, particularly stories and poems written by Edgar Allen Poe, and had memorized Poe's "The Raven."
Lincoln dabbled in poetry himself, with his verse mimicking Poe's dark themes. In Lincoln's poem "My Childhood-Home I See Again," published in 1846 in the Quincy Whig, the future president tells of a childhood friend gone insane, according to information supplied by Blanchette.
Lincoln also wrote an anonymous narrative published in the Whig and the Sangamo Journal in 1846, "Remarkable Case of Arrest For Murder," about a real murder case where the alleged victim appeared with amnesia in the courtroom just before the defendants, the Trailor brothers, were to be sentenced to death for murder.
In the narrative, Lincoln admitted "while it is readily conceived that a writer of novels could bring a story to a more perfect climax, it may well be doubted, whether a stranger affair ever really occurred. Much of the matter remains in mystery to this day."
What's no mystery at all is the ongoing interest in Lincoln.
As the first president assassinated in office, Blanchette said "there's still a lot of mystery" surrounding what Lincoln would have accomplished and what might have happened to the country under his continued leadership.
People around the world look at Lincoln as an icon of freedom.
"Every country in the world, even the most hardened communist countries of old, has something named after Lincoln, whether a statue or a street," Blanchette said. "He is the most recognized American on the face of the planet and the second most written-about individual in human history behind only Jesus Christ."
Capitalizing on the reading public's bloodthirsty interest in vampires, coupled with a connection to Lincoln, "is all a way to engage modern audiences about an old topic," Blanchette said.
"If you keep it fresh, and you keep engaging your nontraditional audience, you will keep Lincoln's life and legacy alive in the minds of the general public," Blanchette said.
-- dhusar@whig.com/221-3379
