Last American Vampire — Forrest Gump With Fangs

Look, I need to get something off my chest: I have a complicated relationship with mashup horror. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was a gimmick that landed because it was short, sharp, and didn't overstay its welcome. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter worked because the premise was so absurd it circled back to sincere. But a 14-hour sequel that tries to cram a vampire into every major event of the 20th century? That's where my skepticism meter starts twitching.

And yet. Here I am, having listened to the whole thing during a rainy weekend drive up the Oregon coast to Astoria, and I'm... mostly won over? Annoyed in spots, but won over.

Henry Sturges: America's Most Patient Immortal

The thing Grahame-Smith does well - and I want to give credit where it's due - is he takes the Forrest Gump approach to vampire fiction and plays it completely straight. Henry Sturges isn't winking at the camera. He's grieving Lincoln, searching for purpose, and stumbling through history the way immortals probably would: with exhaustion and a growing sense of futility. The Jack the Ripper sequence, where Henry teams up with Bram Stoker and Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, really), is exactly the kind of historical fan fiction that shouldn't work but does because Grahame-Smith commits to the bit with genuine enthusiasm. There's a feeding scene involving something called "ballooning" that made me bark-laugh in the car, which is not a reaction I expected from a vampire novel.

The scope is genuinely ambitious. We go from Reconstruction to the Hindenburg to the JFK assassination, with stops at Tesla's lab, the October Revolution, and both World Wars. It's a lot. Sometimes too much. The novel has this structural tic where it switches between first and third person - Henry narrating his own life, then pulling back to a more documentary style - and in print, I imagine that works fine. In audio? It's disorienting. You're locked into Henry's interiority, his grief and wry immortal exhaustion, and then suddenly you're yanked into omniscient narration covering the same events from a different angle. MacLeod Andrews handles the transitions about as well as anyone could, but the whiplash is baked into the text itself.

MacLeod Andrews Carries 14 Hours Like It's Nothing

Here's the thing about Andrews: the man understands pacing over distance. Fourteen hours is a marathon, and a lesser narrator would've let the energy flag somewhere around the World War I trenches. Andrews doesn't. He finds the emotional register of each era - the grief-soaked Reconstruction chapters feel different from the manic energy of early 20th century New York, which feel different from the paranoid Cold War passages. He's not doing vocal pyrotechnics. He's doing something harder: sustained engagement across decades of fictional and real history without ever sounding bored or checked out. The narrator commits. That's rare.

I can't give you a detailed breakdown of specific character voices because my research came up thin on that front, and I won't invent things. What I can tell you is that Andrews kept me company through two days of Pacific Northwest rain and winding coastal roads without me once reaching for the skip button. For a 14-hour single-narrator production, that's the highest compliment I can give.

Fun, Clever, and About Two Hours Too Long

My real issue with The Last American Vampire isn't execution - it's identity. Is this horror? Thriller? Historical fiction with a supernatural gimmick? The book doesn't seem sure, and that uncertainty bleeds into the listening experience. The Ripper sequence is genuinely creepy - Grahame-Smith lets the Victorian fog and paranoia do real work there. The war sections play more like action-adventure. The Kerouac-influenced road trip stuff is almost... wistful? I kept waiting for the dread to settle in permanently, for the book to find its horror footing and stay there, but it's more interested in being a grand American epic with vampires than in being scary.

And honestly? That's fine. Not everything with fangs needs to terrify. But if you're coming to this expecting atmospheric horror, recalibrate. This is bigger, broader, and more concerned with scope than with getting under your skin. The "ballooning" feeding scene is the exception - body horror played for both laughs and discomfort, and it's the kind of weird, specific detail that makes me think Grahame-Smith has a genuinely twisted imagination when he lets himself off the historical tourism leash.

Who Gets an Invitation (and Who Gets Left at the Door)

If you loved Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, this is a worthy follow-up. If you're a history nerd who likes alternate history with actual teeth (sorry, not sorry), you'll eat this up. If you want pure dread, the kind of slow-creeping terror where Shirley Jackson walked so others could run - this isn't that book. For true, gut-punch dread that doesn't let up, I can't stop thinking about Menendez Murders—the horror is all too real, and it lingers long after the final chapter. It's fun, it's clever, it's well-narrated, and it could lose a couple hours in the middle without anyone noticing.

Shelve Under "Guilty Pleasure, Heavy on the Pleasure"

Shirley (my cat) was unimpressed. I was entertained. Not terrified, not shaken, but genuinely entertained for a long rainy Oregon weekend. Sometimes that's enough. Andrews earns every minute of his 14-hour commitment, the history is more interesting than it has any right to be, and that Ripper chapter with Stoker and Doyle? I'd listen to a whole spinoff of just that trio hunting monsters through gaslit London.

My podcast listeners are going to love this one - not because it's great horror, but because the "is it even horror?" debate alone could fuel a two-hour episode. If you're craving a vampire story that fully commits to the horror-romance hybrid, Once Burned sinks its teeth into both with a narrator who makes every electric moment count. Worth grabbing on sale. Not quite worth a full credit unless you're already invested in Henry Sturges's very long, very bloody American life.