I’ve been taking a break from horror novels to read more non-fiction. But just because I’m shifting gears doesn’t mean that I’m leaving the darkness behind! While true crime is a popular destination for vacationing horror fiction fans like myself, serial killers and the like have never been my jam. Instead, I’m more at home in the often eldritch and overlapping worlds of history, anthropology, and cultural studies. It was while searching in these areas that I came across Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2011) by folklorist Michael Bell. I’m from Rhode Island, a state that’s central to Bell’s study, and I always enjoy reading about its long and, some say, haunted past. Combine the chronicles of my natal backwater with the lore of my favorite mythical monsters and I’m in! 

Unfortunately, when I’m this excited to read something, it almost inevitably disappoints me and that’s the case here. For starters, Bell strips the word “vampire” of its defining features and applies it in contexts where, he readily admits, it isn’t appropriate. His overarching concerns are sometimes mired in excessive genealogical detail, superfluous anecdotes, and over-long transcripts. My biggest issue with the book is Bell’s representation of his interview subjects, who are set up to be, at best, quaint rustics and, at worst, insensitive idiots. We often seem to be having a laugh at their expense and it’s uncomfortable. Nonetheless, Food for the Dead sheds light on a fascinating part of the New England folk medicine tradition and offers an emotionally compelling story of human struggle in the face of a seemingly insurmountable disease. It’s worth reading on these counts alone–no vampires required. 

Intrigued by the legend of Mercy Brown, New England’s most famous “vampire,” Bell sets off to discover the real story behind the region’s supposed blood suckers. In the course of his research, he uncovers the history of what he calls “the vampire practice,” a folk medicine technique that rural New Englanders of the 18th and 19th centuries used to cure tuberculosis. He considers the possible origins of the remedy and traces how it may have spread through New England by way of troop movements, kinship ties, and itinerant healers. Descriptions of the practice, he finds, have little in common with the classic vampire myth. Most significantly, no one involved in the exhumations or in the local transmission of the stories used the “v” word to describe what was happening. 

So how did the term come into use? According to Bell, it was only used by outsiders and its deployment was part of a broader cultural war between the rural and the urban, the superstitious “swamp yankee” and the “civilized” city sophisticate. With the emergence of germ theory, the release of Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, and the rise of mass media in the early 20th century, vampires became a source of entertainment, and the European literary discourse around these creatures became the primary means of interpreting New England’s stories. Much to Bells’ dismay and frustration, Dracula continues to cast a shadow that blots out the historical nuances of the region’s peculiar folkloric practice. 

Bell’s sources go beyond genealogical records and old newspapers. For those of a more literary bent, he also looks at the representation of New England’s “vampire practice” in fiction and poetry, paying special attention to Lovecraft, Poe, and Amy Lowell. If you enjoy the macabre works of these authors, then you’ve probably found yourself drawn to haunted hotspots–houses and cemeteries where ghosts have been sighted. So called “legend tripping” is a popular activity in the horror community, and Bell provides interesting insights into how this modern practice shapes the evolution of local lore. 

There’s a lot to like about Food For the Dead but plenty of problems, too. For starters, Bell’s generous use of the word “vampire” feels like a cynical marketing ploy because, as he persuasively demonstrates, the New England cure for tuberculosis has nothing to do with vampires as they are generally understood. If extricating this regional folk remedy from the cobwebs of misinterpretation is the main point of his book, then why does he lean so heavily on the language of said misinterpretation? Anticipating this question, he writes, 

I use the term vampire when referring to the individuals who were exhumed, not because . . . they were labeled as vampires by their exhumers, but because it is a shorthand means for referencing them. I could have substituted a more accurate phrase, such as ‘corpses who were suspected of being the cause, directly or indirectly, of the illness and death of their kinfolk,’ but that would soon become tedious to writer and reader alike.

(x-xi)

In other words, he’s sacrificing historical precision for the sake of brevity and convenience. To me this trade-off isn’t worth it for a couple of reasons. First, the point of studies like this is to get inside the minds of historical actors by reconstructing the frameworks they would have used to understand their own behavior. What did these New Englanders think they were doing when they disinterred bodies and burned their hearts? It’s difficult to recover their intentions–or, at least, to foreground their motivations in the reader’s mind-when you import a label as heavily freighted as “vampire” into a scene that isn’t about destroying malevolent creatures. Secondly, “vampire” has a commonly understood meaning that includes active bloodsucking of the kind that forces the dead to rise from the grave. By deleting this most salient feature, Bell transforms the term into a category so broad that it could include almost anything. So much for respecting nuance. And finally, if Bell’s goal is to balance historical correctness with concision, other words would have served him better. In context, “corpse” is more than sufficient to communicate the larger definition given above and, in circumstances requiring further detail, a phrase like “consumption victim” could steer a lost reader. Generating his own substitutes, Bell suggests that “scapegoat” is likely the most accurate because it describes how exhumed bodies functioned in relation to their communities. Why doesn’t it appear on the book’s cover? I suspect it’s because it doesn’t have the powerful allure of “vampire.”

As for the book’s title, it’s easy to imagine alternatives that would give readers a better idea of its content. Instead of On the Trail of New England’s Vampires, a tagline that frames  Bell’s work as an exciting monster hunt with the researcher in hot pursuit, he could have called it something more descriptive like Folk Medicine and Tuberculosis in New England. There is an audience for books on the history of medicine, a genre in which this text is easily slotted, but, let’s face it, books on vampirism have a much larger readership. 

I’m deep into this review and haven’t yet begun to discuss Food for the Dead in earnest because I’m still quibbling over language. What’s gotten under my skin? Ordinarily the kind of misdirection I’ve described here wouldn’t bother me at all. I understand that authors, particularly academics, need to market their books so as to reach the widest possible audience. The real frustration for me, which I suspect I’m displacing onto Bell’s word choices, is his condescension toward fans of the classic vampire, those who prefer the Dracula myth to the true story of Mercy Brown and who feel letdown when the reasons behind her disinterment are revealed. Apparently this is a response that Bell often faces, and it makes him “wonde[r] why a person would want to cling to a tired, trite symbol” when they could embrace the fascinating history he has to offer (295). The answer, he suspects, is that vampire fans are all vapid consumers looking for reductive and, therefore, easily digestible pieces of culture. They’re intellectually vapid, wanting exciting experiences without having to think too hard about them. I, on the other hand, think that this kind of disappointment could be avoided by using language properly and setting the right expectations. If you actively solicit vampire enthusiasts, they will come. It isn’t nice to then mock their interests.

If Bell’s title is misleading in some ways, it’s spot on in others. This book is about the “trail,” the journey, the long and twisting road of scholarly investigation. Instead of leaving the research process off the page and saving that space for a neat summary of his findings, he makes it the center of the book, taking you with him to archives, cemeteries, and interviews. This approach has its advantages and disadvantages. In the first category, we get to see how legends evolve in conversation and how new variations are introduced into old stories. We also get to meet funny characters like Lewis Everett Peck, a descendant of Mercy Brown, and to hear amusing anecdotes about ghosts at URI and haunted mills. While this local lore isn’t immediately connected to Bell’s quest, it’s likely to entertain readers of this book whom I’m guessing have a general interest in the macabre. The downside is that we often get caught up in complicated family trees and are taken down paths that lead nowhere. Dead ends are revisited again and again. This may be an honest look at academic labor, but it makes for tedious reading. 

What’s worse than being boring, though, is being patronizing, and some of the very long transcripts seem to serve little purpose but to make fun of the participants. The interview with town historians Cora and Blanche is a case in point. Repeatedly insisting that Nellie Vaughn wasn’t a vampire, Blanche doesn’t understand that, for a folklorist like Bell, the truth status of a claim–whether or not Nellie was an actual monster–is irrelevant. Her inability to grasp the nature of his project is an obvious source of frustration to Bell, and his account of the conversation, which includes his inner thoughts and spoken asides, seems designed to showcase her lack of sophistication. 

But this implicit teasing seems gentle compared to his treatment of Jennie, a friend of his assistant, who takes him to the Young Family Cemetery and, later, on a search for supernatural light orbs. Though unrelated to his quest, Bell spends a lot of time describing Jennie’s affect and vocal peculiarities. Alternately whispering, giggling, and screaming, she rapidly modulates the volume of her voice in ways that make her seem more like a child than an adult woman. You can feel his judgement through the unnecessary inclusion of speech riddled with malapropisms (“Shunned upon!”), colloquialisms, and grammatical errors. At first I thought my reaction to Jennie was misdirected self-loathing. Whether right or wrong, I’ve worked hard to kill my New England accent and to peel away the regional usages that characterize her conversation. But Bell’s opinion of Jennie is crystal clear. “[S]tanding amid the tumbledown headstones of young adults who perished before their parents too soon,” he contemplates his emotional response to the gloomy cemetery, compares it to Jennie’s, and finds hers wanting: “Perhaps Jennie was nervous, frightened, and thrilled. I was immensely saddened” (188). What will Jennie think when she reads this book and finds herself depicted as an unfeeling yokel? As someone from the backwoods of Rhode Island, I see myself in her and, consequently, feel a little resentful of the rough treatment. 

Food for the Dead has its awkward moments, to be sure, and maybe I feel them more acutely because I was once a local. But my provincial roots are also why I like it: I haven’t heard the phrase “bookin’ it” or thought of the department store Ann & Hope in decades. This isn’t to say that you have to be from New England to appreciate what Bell’s done. Through careful research, he recovers an approach to illness and healing that’s completely foreign today. What hasn’t changed, though, is our desire to protect our loved ones, and it’s in this shared aim of preserving our families at all costs that we can begin to understand the “superstitious” and seemingly grotesque actions of our ancestors. Bell brings the “swamp yankee” close, reminding us that no matter how sophisticated we think we are, we’re never that far from the darkness of the past.