Review Of How To Read Literature Like A Professor By Thomas C. Foster

In How to Read Literature Like a Professor Thomas C. Foster writes about how to thoroughly read and analyze literature. He focuses on the many different aspects of writing that are used by authors. Despite being a relatively serious and informational subject, Foster is able to use language that is entertaining and more light hearted. He uses many jokes and puns in his book, and even many titles include artistically worded headings that grab the reader's’ attention. An example of these creative captions is the chapter Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires. In this chapter it becomes apparent that vampires are not simply monsters with fangs, but can be real people found in society.
In the chapter Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampires Foster writes

Vernon J Geberth is a former NYPD homicide commander, and he wrote the article Psychopathic Sexual Sadists The Psychology and Psychodynamics of Serial Killers. In Gerberth’s article, he claims that methods such as strangulation and hands on manual killing are signs of “sadistic murderer reveals that such individuals are unconcerned with the moral implications of their brutality. They are excited by the sight of suffering and helplessness of their victims, whom they experience as objects. They usually kill by strangulation, apparently because of the total control over the victim that this method offers them” (Gerberth Psychopathic Sexual Sadists). The modus operandi of Ted Bundy was typically strangulation and because he raped and manually killed his victims, he was classified as a sexual sadist serial killer, which means that he basically killed, in Bundy’s own words “Whatever gets your rocks off” (Theodore Bundy). Because he killed, tortured and raped women to satisfy his own desires, Bundy is a direct example of Foster’s idea that vampires are people that experience “selfishness, exploitation, a refusal to respect the autonomy of other people” (Foster 16). Rule describes Bundy as having “an antisocial personality has no empathy at all for others” (Rule The Stranger Beside Me). Because of Bundy’s lack of empathy, he was able to objectify his victims and experience no remorse; since he didn’t even view them as people. Because of Bundy’s sadistic torture, he is a literal example of Foster’s idea of vampires, and Ann Rule’s book The Stranger Beside Me offers an in depth description of vampiristic characteristics of the criminal