Vampire Universe Book Review
Zombos Says: Very Good
There are days I wish I could recapture my youth, or maybe trade some of my heavy years now for those light ones happily spent not worrying about anything that wasn’t comic book or monster-movie related. I’d trade a month here or there just to go back and hop on my red and chrome bicycle with the racoon tail, banana seat, and gleaming headlight that easily lit the dark ways of late-night rendezvous, with the neighborhood kids, in low or high beam.
I’d even trade weeks for the chance to visit Phil Seuling’s comic book shop again. Just off of 86th Street in Brooklyn, it was the oasis to my daily desert-trek through Catholic school and the mundane world. You’d never quess that Phil taught English at the local High School, or that he knew so many wonderful people involved with those wonderful, spirit-lifting, awe-inspiring, and conversation-shifting movies in paper form, comic books. I’ll never forget the time I met Roy Thomas either, or the issue of Submariner Number One he autographed for me; oh, and that issue of Conan the Barbarian Number One, too.
Funny enough, when I’d often bike over to Phil’s shop and hang out, I’d leave with much more than just geeky chit-chat and prized copies of the latest FF, Spidey, Captain America, or Doctor Strange. Once I left with a leather-bound and really old set of Charles Dickens’ complete works — needed help to get it home it was so big. Another time I left with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, Savage Pellucidar, and Carson of Venus paperbacks. They were really cheap; cover price was thirty-five cents. I still have Savage Pellucidar. Now and then I’ll crack open those acid-browning pages and refortify myself by taking a good long breadth of the stuff that dreams are made of.
So you could say that Phil’s comic shop was more than just comics for me. I developed a fondness for learning about new, fantastic things through books. Rummaging overstuffed shelves and boxes filled with books, and skilfully pulling books from teetering piles, all to perhaps discover a page here, a paragraph there, or luckily even a whole chapter, is an exuberance I’ve never tired of. When my luck would be so good as to find an entire book full of the incredible, I would snatch it up and race home in glory.
So the short of it is, that’s why I like — no, love — books like Jonathan Maberry’s Vampire Universe: The Dark World of Supernatural Beings that Haunt Us, Hunt Us, and Hunger for Us. It’s the explorer, the discoverer in me that enjoys reading about creepy bumps-in the-night; and Maberry’s book is filled with lots of these wonderfully creepy bumps and more. Jackpot!
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