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"FacebookPinterestAbe Lincoln.jpg\n\n Seth Grahame-Smith was a struggling LA writer when he happened upon the idea of mixing Pride and Prejudice and zombies. Not a year later, he's a best-selling author and a man with a brand new project, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, a book backed by an army of publicists, a new iPhone app, and one bitchin' YouTube trailer.\n\nHere, the author talks bloodsuckers, politics, and why terrible times make us all love monsters.\n\nGQ: Why are people so obsessed with monsters today? \n\n Grahame-Smith: Historically speaking, people tend to turn to the horror genre when times are bad. And the last few years in America, times have kind of sucked as far as the economy, and wars and stuff. My own theory is people turn to horror and to these creatures because they remind us that our lives could be a whole lot worse.\n\nGQ: Zombies and now vampires seem especially popular...\n\n Grahame-Smith: Yeah. As far as zombies go, they've always been a punching bag for whatever iills we find ourselves up against. George Romero used zombies in the 60s and 70s to comment on things like the spread of communism and our selfish crass consumerism. They've always been both a really easy target and a walking metaphor. Vampires, on the other hand, are a little more complicated, and I think the draw has a lot to do with both the idea of immortality and our own fear of death. You know \"wouldn't it be cool to live forever?\"\n\n **\n\n GQ: PP&amp;amp;Z was one of those books, like Harry Potter, that was not only blown up in book store windows and a instant best-seller, but was actually embraced by book critics. **\n\n Grahame-Smith: It totally changed my life.\n\nGQ: And now it's going to be a movie directed by David O. Russell (Three Kings) and starring Natalie Portman. Why was it such a hit?\n\n Grahame-Smith: I think it comes down to... well, look at what Gregory Maguire did with Wicked. He found a new way into a story we all know backwards and forwards. And finding a new way into a familiar story lets readers experience that story almost for the first time again. So it gives people a chance to discover something they love all over again, when it's done right.\n\nAnd I think a lot of people who read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a lot of those people who loved the book were diehard Jane Austen fans who loved Pride and Prejudice and read it every year. The same thing, I hope, is true for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. We're all sort of familiar with the towering myth of Lincoln. We're all familiar with 'four score and seven years ago' and Ford Theater and that image of Lincoln and his beard and everything. But what I'm hoping is that people get to discover that familiar story all over again in a different way.\n\nGQ: You're also a political blogger and I noticed that while the new book has plenty of slaying, the story also has heavy political metaphors.\n\n Grahame-Smith: The book is weirdly partisan in a way, because it speaks to, you know, there's the humans versus the vampires the North versus the South, the Democrats versus the Republicans. And there are passages in the book where you have Abraham Lincoln beheading vampires that have certain Southern politicians in their pockets. But those are based on incidents, true incidents, where Senators were literally beating each other half to death on the floor of the Senate. So in a way, while it's an absurd kind of scope...while it has a sort of over-the-top feel about it, it mirrors the ridiculous partisanship going on in politics today. You almost think that these guys, if you put an a in their hands, would chop each others' heads off at some point. The divides are just so deep. And there's still racial tension bubbling just beneath the surface in today's world that just happen to play itself out a little more openly in the book and in Abe's time.\n\nThe anxiety for me is the fact that there's just so much partisanship that how can anything, good or bad, ever be accomplished? Because you have these two immovable sides, these two immovable objects brushing up against each other and going nowhere. And if you continue that line of reasoning, the scarier outcome is that these two sides decide that they don't want to have anything to do with each other and then you have a sort of repeat of the Civil War. And I don't think that's going to happen, but sometimes you have to wonder what will happen when there's so much bluster on both sides with so many people yelling and not many people listening?\n\n **\n\n GQ: Was the idea to do a political book? A monster book? A Lincoln book?**\n\n Grahame-Smith: It started out as an observation. I like to hang out in bookstores, to just pull things off the tables, see what people are reading, then read some of that myself, just to stay current on what's out there. And a couple years ago, we were leading up to the Lincoln bicentennial, and it seemed like there was a new Lincoln biography coming out every week. I mean, there was a Lincoln table at the book store! But at the same time, there was the whole Twilight thing and then Stephenie Meyer started to blow up. So there was also vampire table. Every bookstore I went into, I was overwhelmed by Lincoln books and vampire books. And that was just the observation for me: I wonder if people can't get enough of both of these... I wonder if these two great tastes taste even better together? You know, like the Reeses peanut butter cup theory.\n\nGQ: Have you met Natalie Portman?\n\n Grahame-Smith: No. That's still a special day. Maybe I'll meet her at the Premiere."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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