Title: Dracula the Un-Dead

Author: Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt

Paperback: 424 pages

Publisher: Dutton (2009)

Amazon: Instant Look Up

 

 

 

 

 

 

Appraising Eyeballs:

 

From the Back of the Book:

 

He returns

 

 

Bruce’s Appraisal:

Warning: This review contains spoilers, including the ending of the book.  There is another warning halfway through, before the spoilers commence.  The ending of the book is spoiled at the end of the review, by which time you may understand why such an egregious act has been committed.

 

Okay, first of all, that’s cool. 

He returns

Just like that, in script, with a trail of ink that makes you wonder, Was this written in someone’s blood?  Is that a statement…or a warning?

Mary Shelley gets all the press; Frankenstein is considered the gothic novel that “got it right.”  But sometimes getting it right misses the mark.  Sometimes you have to get it just a little bit wrong to become transcendent.  That may be hyperbole, but Bram Stoker’s Dracula transcends quite a lot.  After more than a century, it continues to spawn movies, cartoons, magazines, comics, and novels.  Even sequels. 

Most of these can be carefully avoided by the discerning consumer.  For the most part, an author who can’t come up with his own vampire probably doesn’t have the creativity to merit a second glance.  I mean, really, how many books are published with a main character of Abraham Lincoln, somehow surviving his assassination and combating slavery in the modern day?  Or Gandhi, miraculously recovering from those fatal gunshot wounds and emerging to spread non-violent passive aggressivism once more?

But here is a book written by a Stoker.  A fellow with the inside track.  A fellow who, if anyone, has the right to use Dracula in his work.  Who knows what secrets the Stoker family has been holding all these years?  Who knows what Bram Stoker’s plans might have been, had he ever revisited the character!

There’s also the coolness of the book’s dedication, which Thanks Bram Stoker on behalf of his family.  Clearly, this is coming from a place of caring, even reverence for the source.

At first, the book is off to a rollicking start.  As a nod to the epistolary form of Stoker’s original, we kick off with a letter.  And it’s a whopper.   A letter to Quincey Harker, Esq,, to be delivered in the event of the death of Wilhelmina Harker.  Oh, yeah.  That’s what I’m talking about.

And then we are introduced to the villain of the piece, and it’s a bit of a wonder.  There is some real genius in the selection of the antagonist, and I still recall laughing in genuine excitement when I read her name in the first chapter.  It was perfection.

It was also the last time I thought anything positive about this novel.

It’s so hard to write that.  When I learned about the Stoker sequel, I waited on pins and needles till I could get my hands on it.  I was there on the day it was released.  I planned to read it as my October horror novel.  It wasn’t the sort of excitement where I had a million ideas of what could happen.  I was a blank slate, waiting to be awed.  Anything would be accepted.  Anything!

Well, as it turns out, anything except this.

Like the song says, sometimes love is not enough.  And while Stoker and Holt clearly appreciate the original, this is a sequel only in the sense that it picks up after Dracula, and involves many of the same characters and locations.  Wait.  That sounds like a sequel, doesn’t it?  In fact, isn’t that the definition of one?

I thought so, until I read Dracula the Un-Dead.

It’s like this.  Alien was a horror movie with science fiction elements.  For the sequel, James Cameron made a science fiction move with horror elements.  To picture the relationship between Dracula and Dracula the Un-Dead, imagine that, instead of James Cameron, they had hired Mel Brooks.  Even with a character named Ripley, and a guy in an H.R. Giger-suit, you just wouldn’t have a sequel to Ridley Scott’s movie.

Here are just some of the complaints that caused me to take two years to finish reading this book.  This book is the reason that my wife began talking to me about my “stubborn insistence to finish reading every book I start.”  This is the book that almost broke me.

Warning.  Ahead you will find spoilers:

 

Within the first seven chapters:

1.       Jonathan Harker, the everyman hero of Dracula, is revealed to have become a drunken whoremonger who sleeps in a different room from Mina, his wife.

2.      Jonathan Harker is then murdered while estranged from his family.

3.      Jack Seward is described as an old man who succumbed to his morphine addiction.  Yet he functions like a man out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  And we’re not talking about Riley here.  We’re talking Angel or Spike or the Mayor.  We’ve got scaling walls.  We’ve got swordfighting.  We’ve got full-blown James Bonding here.

4.      Jack Seward is then run down in the street by a carriage and killed.

5.      Mina Harker is an embittered woman who has watched her family disintegrate around her.  She feels trapped in a woman’s role in polite society and has watched life pass her by, day by day.

6.      Arthur Holmwood has disavowed all of his former friends.  He has re-written his memory of the events of that day and considers everyone else to be mad.  He is in a loveless marriage designed to shelter a family friend from losing her status.

7.      Van Helsing is a venerable old man, sickly, and is about to be accused of being Jack the Ripper.

8.     He hasn’t returned yet.

 

So, before going on, we are left to ask, Why in the nine circles of hell would anyone want to read this?  Isn’t the point of surviving a horror story that you get to be stronger from the experience?  That you learn to appreciate the simple joys of life?  That you look around with renewed wonder at that which had been mundane before you so nearly lost it?

Apparently not.  Apparently, surviving a horror novel leads to drug addiction, alcoholism, whorish behavior, losing friendship with everyone who could have commiserated with you, and just pining for the day Death does come with his carriage.  Oh, and if you’re lucky you get to learn how to fight like you’re in a John Woo movie.

But that’s just the beginning.

 

In the Rest of the Book:

1.       Arthur hasn’t re-written events.  You learn this when the narrative requires Arthur to join the story.  He’s hasn’t come to remember things incorrectly.  He’s just an asshole.  But then he turns into the only character in the entire novel that could be considered remotely heroic.  But then he dies, too.

2.      Seeing a Ten Little Indians theme here?  Oh, it’s there.  Set them up.  Knock them down.

3.      Katana.  Mina pulls out Jonathan’s katana—a gift from his business partners in Japan—and then carries it into the final conflict.  Someone got a little too distracted by Buffy the Vampire Slayer while researching Bram’s novel.

4.      When he finally does return—nevermind that in true Scooby-Doo fashion he’s been there the whole time, as the only character that either isn’t from the original novel or else from Scotland Yard—but when he finally does return, he explodes through the roof of a train car, landing in a crouch with a shock of flowing dark hair over his blazing eyes and justice in his gaze.  Yes.  He has become a cross between Neo from The Matrix and mullet-haired, 90s Superman.

5.      They fight in mid-air.  The vampires leap into the air, slashing and kicking at one another as they fly past each another.  It’s like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was stabbed in the gut and allowed to bleed out until nothing was left but Matrix: Reloaded.

6.      Van Helsing becomes a vampire and tries to kill his former friends when they can’t appreciate the genius of Dracula.

7.      Quincey Harker isn’t Jonathan and Mina’s son.  Mina had a tryst with Dracula in the original novel.  He’s Dracula’s boy.  So he’s half vampire.  He just didn’t know it because he hasn’t been put in a stressful enough situation for his super-strength to manifest.

8.     Dracula really is the hero.  He’s been misunderstood all along and is actually still fighting on God’s side.  That whole thing with Lucy?  A tragic accident.  And all Van Helsing’s fault, really.  All Dracula really wants is to be reunited20 with his true love and estranged son.

 

The Writing:

1.       A man is disemboweled.  He has the urge to vomit as he begins to fall over, then he realizes, he doesn’t have the stomach for it.

2.      He steps into thin air.  “Thin air?”  Isn’t that one of the examples used in every book on how to write?  Phrases like that are “poster children” for what not to do.

3.      And how to show grief.  Well, apparently, you can avoid any sort of in-depth discussion of physical appearance or inner conflict by simply throwing every possible cliché into one paragraph.  She’d lost her son.  So: She was Lot’s wife.  The light went out her eyes.  Her heart turned to stone.  Dear God, make it end. 

4.      Aside from the writing, there’s the element of shortening chapters.  A great approach to ratchet up the tension.  But when we’re told at the mid-point that we have entered the “endgame,” and thereafter no chapter is longer than four or five pages…The “endgame” really does start to feel like a seventh-inning stretch. 

 

The Ending (Yes, I’ll spoil that, too.  Don’t read it if you don’t want to.)

1.       One character survives.  He decides to make his way to America to start anew.  And he gets a ticket on board the fucking Titanic.

 

And there you have it.  A labor, and not one of love.

I’m Done With It.

 

 

 

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