This is a clumsy edition, over double wide and almost impossible to read. The lines run on to a hundred characters and the cover needs to be bent and folded to properly read each page. It would have been better to make the book thicker and the width narrower. And there's a dumb-ass advertisement at the bottom of the preface for an online fortune telling website...
That over with, another great read, more, as you get into it, a conversation with a fabulously well read and traveled eccentric uncle whom your parents would never allow to babysit you...
He begins by summarizing some other books upon the topic and then comically and scathingly critiquing the authors and their sources - his are undeniably the best, for he reads the original manuscripts and quotes them verbatim only occasionally deeming to provide a translation (presuming that like all educated people you can read Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Serbian, etc etc.). Much of the material is the same as in "How to Recognize and Destroy Real Vampires" but much (if formatted correctly this book would run over 500 pages) of it is new, and this is but one book, he promises others on the Vampires of Europe, of the UK, etc etc. Clearly more than an interest. And there is no one more qualified. Properly filled with anecdotes and "evidence" he draws upon traditions and folklore worldwide to substantiate his argument that - in 1928 - Vampires are still real and a proper scourge to Southern Europe especially and the world in general.
What I find curious is the commonalities in the folklore and treatment - how different cultures - widely separated by time, continents and oceans - should so often agree both as to the cause and creation of Vampires as well as their extirpation.
This is curious. Even if I don't accept the "reality" of Vampires as such - corporeal manifestations of evil, I have to acknowledge they're speaking to a deeper metaphorical truth, and the rituals and lore associated with them is not merely embellishment but speaks to something else. Only I haven't yet figured out what...
That's OK. There's still another 400 pages to go and the epiphany might well happen before the end. That or I'll start sharpening some stakes...