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 harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society's inexplicable terrors and anxieties.

In 1732, the British public opened their morning papers to read of lurid happenings in eastern Europe. Serbian villagers had dug up several corpses and had found them to be undecayed and bloated with blood. Recognizing the marks of vampirism, they mutilated and burned them. Centuries earlier, the English themselves engaged in the same behavior. In fact, vampire epidemics have flared up throughout history--in ancient Assyria, China, and Rome, medieval and early modern Europe, and the Americas. Blair blends the latest findings in archaeology, anthropology, and psychology with vampire lore from literature and popular culture to show how these episodes occur at traumatic moments in societies that upend all sense of security, and how the European vampire is just one species in a larger family of predatory supernatural entities that includes the female flying demons of Southeast Asia and the lustful yoginīs of India.

Richly illustrated, Killing the Dead provocatively argues that corpse-killing, far from being pathological or unhealthy, served as a therapeutic and largely harmless outlet for fear, hatred, and paranoia that would otherwise result in violence against marginalized groups and individuals.

Author: John Blair
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 11/11/2025
Pages: 536
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.15lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 2.00d
ISBN: 9780691224794


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 09/29/2025

About the Author
John Blair is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His many books include Building Anglo-Saxon England (Princeton), The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, and The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short Introduction.