Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World

A riveting history of vampire panics across cultures and down through the millennia—and why killing the dead is better than killing the living

Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do ...