Inverview with the vampire expert: Eric Nuzum on censorship, panics, and bloodsucking fiends.

• Author: Weigel, David
• Position: Interview

LIKE MOST people who find themselves wrestling with vampires--Jonathan Harker, Robert Neville, Buffy--Eric Nuzum was leading a perfectly normal life until the monsters came along, In 2001 he published Public Advisory: Music Censorship in America, a civil libertarian's history of musical nannyism from the Beatles' "butcher baby" album cover to Tipper Gore's war on W.A.S.P. Nuzum's next project was going to be a history of the American burlesque show.

But vampires got in the way. As Nuzum crunched his Count Chocula one morning, he flipped on his TV and caught President Bush warning against plugging in too many appliances and becoming an "energy vampire. "Then he picked up a magazine and promptly saw a model with fangs and a cape enticing him to buy some vodka and "drink in the night." Suddenly he had a new project. "If the vampire is ubiquitous," he wondered, "how did this happen? Why did this happen? I wanted insight."

So he wrote The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula (Thomas Dunne), a wide-ranging survey of vampire stories, vampire metaphors, and a subculture of people who consider themselves vampires. The last, he learned, are sort of nice. Some are reclusive, some are younger than they say they are in chat rooms, and none of them will prove to a journalist that they actually drink blood. (Nuzum drank some of his own and got very sick.)

"All of the vampire folks I met," Nuzum writes, "are all at least marginally aware of the darkness in their own lives. The only difference between them and us is that they've styled their physical world to match their inner one."

Associate Editor David Weigel spoke with Nuzum in October.

reason: This seems like an off-kilter follow-up to your first book. What's the connection between music censorship and vampires?

Eric Nuzum: There's much more than you'd think. Vampires are the perfect metaphor. You use them to express things you fear, things you find exciting. Music plays the same role in some people's lives. When you look at some of the issues around music censorship, you're controlling what someone can and can't listen to, or what they can and can't say. People will say "Ozzy Osbourne is responsible for my kid shooting his head off," or overdosing, or killing himself. Ozzy must be the problem! But the reality is that Ozzy is a symptom, not a cause. People who have extreme emotions, who hold extreme views of the world, pick extreme music to represent that.

reason: It...