Disclaimer: I did not finish this book. I read two chapters, which comprised sixty pages and thus about one-third of the entire book.
When I got this book, the reviews on the back (because god forbid we have synopses anymore) led me to believe that it was a psychology book exploring the relationship between Bram Stoker’s Dracula and parent-child sexual abuse. Indeed, many of his arguments on the basis of literary analysis are interesting, and I see Daniel Lapin’s point in interpreting the text as a subconscious reflection of childhood incest (I am under the impression that I have now, at the one-third point, read the bulk of the genuine literary analysis, so I dont’t believe that I’m missing anything there as I discontinue my reading of it). However, the thesis of the book is wildly different from what I was led to believe, and is the reason I will not be finishing it.
Lapin struggles to articulate his evidence, possibly due to the lack of evidence for it. I gave the book a fair chance, reading through chapter two where he claimed (in his introduction) to provide a defense against claims of his “insanity.” Finding his defense not only lacking but almost offensively weak, I have chosen not to waste my time further. Lapin, a psychologist based in California, claims through this book that “psychic vampires” are in fact literally real, and those vampires are feeding on people’s “psychic blood” via incestuous sexual abuse. He includes many anecdotes from several of his clients regarding their experience with early childhood sexual abuse, perpetrated particularly by their fathers, and it is seemingly around these clients that he builds his argument.
Unfortunately, his “argument” is not. Lapin fails to even adequately describe what psychic vampirism is until chapter two (a third of the way into the book), and his “evidence” for its existence hinges upon too many quotations from Dracula as to the “dangers” of disbelieving in vampires. In fact, he doesn’t actually provide evidence for vampires: his chapter devoted to the defense of his thesis (and his sanity) states, ultimately, that people do not believe in vampires because they don’t want to believe in vampires, and that we should “be open to the possibility that ‘there are such things as vampires; some of us have evidence that they exist’” (60). Again, no evidence is provided; we must instead have faith that the evidence exists, ambiguously so.
In any case, I did not find Lapin’s defense of his sanity to be compelling. Rather, he sounded more like a conspiracy theorist, an anti-intellectual pundit preaching without depth to back his claims. Supposedly the author holds a Ph.D., which is all the more disappointing. I will say that I did enjoy this literary analysis as it pertained to Dracula and would happily have read more on the topic; however, based on the chapter outline it doesn’t seem that there will be much more of that in the book, and his application of Stoker’s novel to real-life circumstances is both disorienting and appalling, especially given that his arguments rely so heavily upon a work of abject fiction (his use of quotations is striking and overwhelming). I believe Mr. Lapin might have found more success writing literary analysis than writing psychology, but c’est la vie.