Saturday 31 October 2009

No pumpkin head

No pumpkin head this year apart from plastic ones and a few candle lights. Still, Halloween is a good occasion to indulge in vampire or horror fiction, so I would like to mention that I was tempted by the relation to Bram Stoker and consequently am reading 'the official sequel' to Dracula: Dracula the Un-dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. It is quite an entertaining romp, bringing back the characters from Stoker's original and some from his notes to once again fight vampires, this time in 1912. At one point, Bram Stoker himself and Hamilton Deane turn up at the Lyceum where they meet the son of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Quincey Harker! You can imagine that Stoker is surprised to meet a character from his novel, and that Quincey is equally surprised to find a novel about his parents opposing a vampire! It reminds me a bit of Kim Newman's entertaining Dracula novel Anno Dracula and its sequels - these are highly entertaining and riveting page-turners, I particularly enjoyed The Blood Red Baron when I read them some ten years ago.

3 comments:

Michelle said...

Got the German translation last week, and I must say I'm really curious. I'm hearing good things, so I'm hoping (though, I'm generally skeptical when it comes to sequels).

klavaza said...

I'm also skeptical on sequels, however, I will try this one with a tabvla rasa attitude.

Niels K. Petersen said...

I rarely read this kind of novel, but this one is actually quite entertaining, and as a bonus it contains a lot of elements that should delight most Dracula buffs. I say: most, because in her afterword, Elizabeth Miller points out some of the things that 'purists' might complain about.

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