John Blair, Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025, xiii, 519 pp., 78 b/w + color illus., 10 maps.

Vampires remain an alluring topic for popular audiences, while scholars have proven more resistant to their dark charms. Indeed, in his preface, John Blair strikes a slightly apologetic note for writing this book: “The subject has always curiously intrigued me, and perhaps I needed to get it out of my system” (p. xi). But Killing the Dead is a serious book. Blair seeks to understand why so many societies, at different times and in different places, believed that the dead could harm the living, and in doing so defends an intriguing, even provocative thesis. Epidemics of “corpse-killing” (e.g., driving a stake through the heart) are responses to traumatic events which have afflicted a community, with the dead being blamed for the trauma. But since the dead are dead, they suffer no harm from these acts; consequently, blaming the dead is preferable to blaming the living – beheading corpses is better than burning witches.