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DRACULA THE UN-DEAD
by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt
Dutton, October 2009
432 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 0525951296


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

I am a little baffled about what to do here. I wanted to like this book. Other competent reviewers liked it. Were we reading the same novel? It is certainly not hard to guess that this is the first foray into the literary world for Bram Stoker's grand- nephew, Dacre and I can only hope it will be his last. Convoluted, strangely homophobic and certainly titillating, DRACULA THE UN-DEAD was really only entertaining in a Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest winner kind of way.

Should I review? Or better just take an excerpt from the novel. Here's my personal choice for entrance in the contest for the worst writing this year:

'Mary Mother of God protect her' Seward prayed, the words coming out like a plaintive whine under his breath. He watched in horror as the Women in White hoisted the naked young woman and hung her upside down by her ankles on a pulley system, suspending her from the ceiling. The dark-haired demon handed Bathory a black leather cat-o-nine tails, with curved metal hooks tipping each lash. The countess's red lips curved into a humorless smile, her otherworldly eyes remaining focused on a single drop of blood now sliding down her victim's chest....

Seward felt hot wetness on his face, and touched his face only to realize he was crying....

I too touched a little hot wetness on my face, tears caused by the realization that I was still reading and, since I had agreed to review this thing, probably would continue to read on to its bitter bloody end.

Perhaps I am being unfair. In truth. Dacre seems to find his stride a couple of hundred pages into his sequel to his uncle's seminal work. The action picks up and he forgoes the flowery prose for an action-packed plot of vampire revenge. The story revolves around the Countess Bathory, the most evil of lesbian vampires, who is hell- bent on killing all the characters and their kin who were involved in the original Dracula novel. Mina, Van Helsing, Johnathan Harker, John Seward and Arthur Holmwood are the main characters, all still plagued by the events surrounding Lucy Westerna's death in the original. Now they are hunted and in turn hunt Dracula twenty-five years after his supposed demise.

There are a series of brutal killings in Paris and London. Is Dracula the culprit? Is Bathory? Is it Jack the Ripper? Do we care? Inspector Cotford, the drunken Scotland Yard detective, does as he gets caught up in Countess Bathory's bloody ambition to simultaneously frame and eat her foes.

Dacre and co-writer Ian Holt try too hard to reproduce the historical period and pepper the novel with actual figures in cameo roles including John Barrymore and even Stoker's very own great-uncle who needlessly comes to a very vampire-esque end .

I am sure that,having been paid a whopping one million dollar advance for this novel, not to mention the proceeds for the film rights, Dacre and Holt will rise again like their hero Dracula to offer us yet another contrived chapter in this vampire's chronicles. Put a stake in its heart, please.

Reviewed by Philippa Klein, October 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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