What Would Buffy Do: The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide [Paperback]

Reviewed by Amanda Killgore.

The book details trials, tribulations, and metaphors that the characters of the show go through every day. The ability to distinguish true good from evil, to stand by your friends, to know when to back down and when to keep going ... these are all incredibly powerful and important life lessons. It doesn't matter that the subjects of the book are a bunch of characters from a fictional television show. This is what philosophy is about. And I couldn't be happier to see that the wonderful creations of Joss Whedon are being used as examples. I'm a writer myself, so I can understand how fictional characters can teach such powerful lessons about who we are. After all, we created them.

Initially I read this book simply because I am a huge BUFFY and ANGEL fan, and am a bit of a completist: I'll read just about any halfway decent discussion of BUFFY. Because of the author's desire to make Buffy into a spiritual role model, I approached the book with considerable suspicion. (For the sake of honesty, I should point out that I do have two theological degrees and did extensive graduate work on the religious thought of Kierkegaard, and still consider myself to be that rarest of creatures, a politically and socially leftist Southern Baptist, so I'm not in the least antithetical to religious ideas.) However, as I started working through Jana Riess's discussions of the various characters in Buffy and some of the themes, I was astonished at how often I found myself in agreement with her, or how she would mention some aspect of the show and I would immediately call to mind another instance that was compatible with what she said, only to have her bring that specific instance up in her book.

I think this book will delight any fan of BUFFY or ANGEL. Riess has a profound understanding of the show and really grasps the dynamics of all the major characters. I learned a great deal about many aspects of the show, and gained insights that I had previously missed. For instance, I had not recognized that Warren, one of the villainous nerds from Season Six, truly had become the super villains he admired in comic books. Or when I read "BUFFY is less about the cycle of one's own sin and salvation than it is about saving others; it is always outwardly, and not inwardly, focused," I realized that that was precisely true about the show.

I was far less convinced by the book's attempt to set Buffy up as a spiritual guide. Perhaps this was just me. My spiritual guides have been people like Kierkegaard, Henry David Thoreau, Montaigne, Wittgenstein, Dostoevsky, and Samuel Johnson. I have never profited much from popular spiritual writers, whether pseudo-intellectuals like Joseph Campbell or spiritual writers like Philip Yancey. They fail to speak to the kind of spiritual struggle that I have been engaged in. It may well be that others will find this part of the book more compelling, but I have to be honest and say that I do not believe that any part of the spiritual guide part of the book left any impact on me.

Nonetheless, I highly recommend this book for any fan of BUFFY. The discussion of the show is as good as we have seen before, and the character and season guides at the back are absolutely superb. On top of all this, the book contains a marvelous interview the author conducted with Eliza Dushku, who played, of course, the rogue slayer Faith in both BUFFY and ANGEL.