and on the Internet in droves. Thanks to Buffy,

Twilight, and a seemingly endless factory of comics,novels, merchandise, and films, in 2010, America is

powdering its neck and eagerly anticipating thatemaciated blood-sucker who will swoop its daughters

off to prom.All of this makes Mary Hallab’s study more timely

and interesting. Hallab takes what can only be deemedas a really ‘‘uncool’’ approach to the vampire genre.

Gone are the endless pages devoted to sexuality andsensualism; instead, Hallab argues convincingly thatwhat makes this genre universal is not the sex and

violence, the repressed drives manifested in capes andhigh rhetoric, but the eternal need to come to terms

with our own inevitability. Using sources ranging fromStoker to folklore to contemporary cinema, Hallab

shows how this genre ‘‘justifies our innate awe and fearof death in a world that brushes off such emotions as

irrational and childish,’’ by reminding us time and timeagain that ‘‘death does not just happen; it makeschoices . . . often contingent upon the victim’s circum-

stances and character’’ (136). The vampire becomes inthis work a moral barometer for the community, the

church, and the self. The vampire offers its victimshorrific and contradictory choices when reflecting on

their deaths. Will they be butchered and left for dead,or will they be granted the ultimate pardon, the

immoral choice of everlasting life, not in some Godlyparadise, but here on a wicked, damned earth. Hallab

systematically shows that ever since vampires appearedin folklore, they have been much more than metaphorsfor societal and sexual taboos. More profoundly, they

have given us a ‘‘mythical focus for universal concernsabout death and its reasons—as well as for a good deal

of wishful thinking’’ (6). This tension—the certainty ofdeath and our unending desire to transcend it—gives

the vampire a spiritual significance often overlookedby the genres creators and critics alike.

Hallab’s book, while brief, thoroughly looks atvampires and their metaphysical implications throughthe lens of science, society, psychology, and religion. In

doing so, she not only focuses on the seminal texts (alot of attention, as expected, is placed on Stoker’s

Dracula) but also a library’s worth of lesser knownprimary materials. This scope allows Hallab to

investigate vampires not only as metaphors of death,but as active selves who struggle with their own

relationship to life, death, salvation, and damnation.

Vampires are the ‘‘ultimate Self,’’ and like most of us,even if we believe death will bring ‘‘a glorious

Christian union with the Godhead . . . these vampireswould rather be alive’’ (65). It is this duel nature of the

vampire, at once a symbol of death and also so fearfuland defiant, so human, so much like us, that is the best

part of Hallab’s argument. They have become, ‘‘minorgods of the cycle of life and death in a modern folklore

pantheon,’’ and their ‘‘excessive love of life on thisearth’’ makes them apt companions for their fans, if notat times dangerous ones (135).

Hallab is at her best when she tackles the mostcontemporary and popular of the ‘‘minor gods.’’ But

instead of approaching Lestat or Angel or Cullen asfashionable sex symbols or depictions of adolescent

angst, she shows them as characters bothered by ourown greatest concerns: what to make of the life we

have been given, and what to make of our maker andthe dark humor of creation. For the influx of newstudents schooled in the pop-cultural sexuality of the

contemporary vampire, Hallab ups-the-ante beyondfashion and fandom, insisting there are more profound

ways to hang out with the damned.

—Gavin Pate

Virginia Wesleyan College

Wanted: The Outlaw in AmericanVisual

CultureRachel Hall. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,

2009.

By exploring a subject as seemingly innocuous as

wanted posters, Rachel Hall embarks on a genealogyof ‘‘professional fugitive display’’ and examines theextent to which these cultural texts simultaneously

delineate and reinscribe state-sanctioned ideology.Hall proposes that the wanted poster, as a plea for

justice, appears to offers me—the ‘‘law-abiding citi-zen’’—an opportunity to serve the greater good while

satisfying my perverse desire for the spectacle ofviolence. In so doing, fugitive displays seek to produce

‘‘the vigilante viewer,’’ an individual who, ‘‘in submis-sion to police authority,’’ becomes conscious of

261Book Reviews

criminal activity and scans cultural terrain for those

who violate the law (7). Hall situates the wantedposter, therefore, as an ‘‘instrument of surveillance’’

wielded to normalize cultural practices (15). For Hall,the history of fugitive display parallels the history of

sociocultural attitudes in the United States. Since theseoutlaw displays, she argues, often constitute little more

than propaganda, Hall ultimately urges the reader toidentify the origins, intents, and potential ramifications

of these documents, ramifications, she suggests, thatultimately cultivate a fear of difference.

With chapters on seventeenth-century woodcuts

advertising public execution, runaway slave notices,and Pinkerton posters, Hall asserts that fugitive outlaw

displays implicitly valorize a set of cultural norms byexplicitly condemning social outliers. While images of

public execution reinforce Puritanical religious doc-trine, portraits of runaway slaves perpetuate institu-

tionalized racism. For Hall, the iconography of thewanted poster, replete with ‘‘gendered and racistideologies’’ so prevalent in ‘‘the frontier imaginary,’’

clearly surfaces in the television series, America’s Most

Wanted (150). Stating that the series combines vigilante

justice with an ‘‘appeal to masculine fantasies about thehumiliation, rape, and mutilation of women and

children,’’ Hall highlights the program’s violentlyphallocentric appeal (123). She also indicts America’s

Most Wanted as a show that ‘‘regularly race-baited itsaudience and implicitly promised white empower-

ment’’ (140). For Hall, the outlaw fugitive displayoperates to homogenize culture and mobilize thepublic to discourage deviation from normalized modes

of conduct.Nowhere is Hall’s position more evident than in

her analysis of the political response to the attacks on9/11. Critiquing George Bush’s call for Osama Bin

Laden, ‘‘Dead or Alive,’’ Hall regards this invocationof ‘‘the frontier imaginary’’ as an attempt ‘‘to assume

the role of the cowboy-as-American-hero’’ (139). ForHall, President Bush’s ‘‘cowboy rhetoric’’ has posi-tioned residents of this country ‘‘as citizen-surveyors’’

and has ‘‘solicited surveillance of ‘‘foreigners’’ andfellow Americans (the enemy within) as a form of

good citizenship’’ (152). Hall, therefore, attributes thephenomenon of patriotism-as-anti-Middle-East to a

presidency’s solipsistic, frontier mentality consistentwith the development of fugitive outlaw display.

A well-researched work that confronts contempor-

ary geo-political concerns, Wanted: The Outlaw in

American Visual Culture leaves some significant

questions unanswered. What do we make of the utilityof the wanted poster? Though fugitive outlaw displays

do, by their nature, articulate intolerance, is it safe toassume that many wanted outlaws, far from simply

representing political or ideological subversion, pose aphysical threat to society? Rachel Hall constructs a

thought-provoking critique of this specific visualmedium, but she offers no alternative to fugitiveoutlaw display. Do not we just need to capture a

criminal sometimes?

—Thomas Blake

Monroe Community College

To the Book Review Editor of The Journal

of American Culture

Subject: Response to the review of Master Me-

chanics and Wicked Wizards by Jim Welsh in the

March 2010 issue of JAC.My recent book, Master Mechanics and Wicked

Wizards, is reviewed by Prof. James Welsh (Emeritus,

Salisbury State University) in the last issue of JAC.While I respect Dr. Welsh’s right as a scholar to

disagree with the argument in my book, I also expectreviewers to meet their responsibility as a scholar to

adequately represent that argument. However, I foundDr. Welsh’s review meandering and superficial, and

ultimately of little use to a reader trying to decidewhether or not my book would be helpful in her/his

work.Even though Prof. Welsh makes some positive

statements about the book, they are buried beneath

irrelevant broadsides, and none of the book’s depth orbreadth is evident in Prof. Welsh’s review (other

reviews have called my research ‘‘breathtaking’’ and‘‘seminal’’). For instance, while he spends an entire

paragraph fulminating about chapter titles, he spendsno space whatsoever summarizing what is in those

chapters. More important, he says absolutely nothingabout the largest chapter in the book on the culture of

262 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 33, Number 3 � September 2010