The myths and folklore of vampires

According to Elkins Park author Jonathan Maberry, we should take everything we know about modern day vampire culture and throw it away. The stories about holy water, garlic, crosses and stakes through the heart are simply manufactured by movie studios to fill their plot lines.
What Maberry says we should be looking, especially during Halloween, is the extensive history of vampire folklore that spreads throughout just about every culture dating back to Ancient Greece and Babylon. To prove the point, Maberry has written close to 700 pages of reference material that chronicles the history of vampires and other supernatural predators titled The Vampire Slayers' Field Guide to The Undead. On October 29 at 7 p.m., Maberry will be reading from his book as part of a Halloween celebration at The Writers Room of Bucks County in Doylestown.
"Every culture had to develop vampire beliefs from the beginning," Maberry said. "They had to explain why certain things happened, and since they couldn't blame it on God, they couldn't believe that God would do certain things, they figured there had to be something else out there. So they created the vampire to explain the inexplicably cruel."
Most of Maberry's writing portfolio deals with martial arts and self-defense. He holds an 8th degree black belt in jujutsu, which he's studied and taught for 35 years. As an established authority on self-defense books, he decided to branch out in a different creative direction.
"My grandmother, she was a spooky old lady," he said. "She remembered the years of the end of the 19th century where people in Europe more commonly believed things than they do now. She told me a lot of the stories of the folklore of Scotland and Germany where she lived as a little girl. As a kid, I kind of had this knowledge of these supernatural beliefs that were pretty scary beliefs."
"Over the years as I've watched horror movies and read horror books, I thought that even though some of them are very good, they would do themselves better if they went back and looked at the folklore because it's a little scarier."
His interest in the horror genre and his extensive knowledge of vampire folklore led him to The Vampire Slayers' Field Guide, but so as to avoid any confusion with the non-fictional self-defense writer, he writes under the pseudonym Shane MacDougall.
"I'm trying to expand as a writer and avoid getting stale," Maberry said. "I've been writing martial arts stuff for years and over those years, occasionally I've gone into other areas and written stuff in blues, the restaurant business, various aspects of business. Most of us have a little bit of adolescence in us and I always liked spooky stories, but I've always been more interested in the folklore behind the scary stories so I figured I'd take a stab at it."
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