Synopsis:

Plainfield, Wisconsin. 1954. Robbing graves to appease his malevolent desires, Ed Gein inadvertently sets loose an ancient vampire on the unsuspecting town of Plainfield. As the number of missing persons rises, Ed realizes the vampire’s ultimate plan has been put into motion, and to prevent his dastardly practices from being exposed, he decides to slay the vampire himself. But he soon understands that he’s all the hope Plainfield has. As the few people closest to Ed are sucked into the vampire’s realm, he’ll be forced to reach deep inside himself to bring the incredible nightmare to an end. On this night, the Ghoul of Plainfield must battle the Vampire of Plainfield…to the death!

Review:

I have been wanting to read The Vampire of Plainfield for quite some time. The premise of Ed Gein, serial kiiler and model for so many fictional serial killers, from Leatherface to Norman Bates to Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, Gein has been a fixture in popular culture and American serial killer fiction for many decades. Kristopher Rufty uses Ed Gein has the centerpiece of the story, a outsider in town who spends many nights digging up graves for heads and body parts. When he finds an old graveyard in the woods and decides to dig up these older graves, he finds that one of the graves is of a corpse with a stake through his heart. He thinks it would be a good money maker to pull the stake out and then ram it back in, over and over, gathering crowds of people to see the spectacle, but as soon as he releases the stake, the vampire flies off and starts killing people in town. Ed Gein knows that he has to find this vampire and put it back into it’s eternal resting place. 

The premise sounds like a great horror novel, vampire against killer, but the story becomes more than that, and most of the extra things are not good. There are many choices that Rufty makes in the novel that are awful, especially when it involves the kids that he writes into the novel. He tries to make the novel more like Salem’s Lot, where Ed has a young man that helps him, but fourteen year old Timmy and his friends are horny and sex is more important to them than getting rid of the vampire. Timmy’s friend Peter is written to be the most horrible person in the novel, more horrible than a serial killer and a vampire. Peter is a classmate of Timmy’s that kidnaps and repeatedly sexually assaults a 10 year old girl before both of them become vampires. Timmy’s love interest, Robin, who is at least seventeen, has her clothes ripped off of her toward the end, and in the middle of the fight between Timmy and the vampire, Timmy has to stop and think about how Robin’s breasts are giving him an erection. All of the descriptions of breasts are the same: a description of the shape and then the size of the nipple. I do not want to read this about underage characters in this way, and it makes the parts about Ed Gein and his obsession with dead bodies, shrinking heads, and wearing the skin of a woman as armor, the least offensive parts. 

I had high hopes for The Vampire of Plainfield, but I cannot get past all of the sexualizing of the underage characters, particularly the ten year old who is repeatedly assaulted. It is unfortunate because I love the ideas behind the plot, I would have liked a more adult focused version of this, where there are no kids getting raped, but instead I have to be clear that this is not a book that I can ever recommend to anyone.