Popular Culture Review Vol. 17, No. 2, Summer 2006 | Page 122

118 Popular Culture Review Philip Kolin's Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia is a masterpiece of its kind, lucidly organized, beautifully written, and so interesting that one is hard pressed to put it down as one entry leads to another. Felicia F. Campbell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas The Vampire as Numinous Experience: Spiritual Journeys with the Undead in British and American Literature Beth E. McDonald McFarland & Company, 2004 Vampires have long held an influential spot in American popular culture, affecting everything from movies (various originals and remakes) to music (the goth sound and scene) to literature (“serious” literature and romance). In response, critics have long wondered what it is about vampires that entrances. However, in spite of the fascination, vampires have always been problematic: somehow at once highly seductive yet emblematic of evil. We just may have an answer in Beth McDonald’s The Vampire as Numinous Experience as she manages to confront this issue in a wholly convincing way. Her thesis? Combining psychological and religious literary theories to interpret various works, she tells us that while vampires are a negative symbol, they hold within them elements of the sacred, able to give humans a numinous, transforming experience. It is emphasized that it is the movement from the known, rational world to the unknown and irrational and back again that is important to the experience: ‘i t should be noted that a symbolic border (where the seeker/traveler crosses over from the known to the unknown) is an important symbol in virtually all journey tales” (93). Another component of the process is that “an experience of the numinous eventually must be perceived as real by the character [in a text] and the reader in order that the anxiety and fear felt through the dynamics of power and powerlessness be at their greatest strength to lead the subject to a change. . . ” (25). The author uses three different texts from three different time periods to illustrate her thesis, moving from the metaphorical (“The Rime of the Mariner,” chapter two) to the iconic (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, chapter three), ending with the realistic, contemporary vamps of Anne Rice’s world ( Vampire Chronicles, chapter four). The author does an able job with the first text. Unfortunately, calling “The Rime of the Mariner” a “vampire tale" is achieved only through tenuous linguistic maneuvering as some scholars have made the vampire connection in