Dracula The Un-Dead, Dacre Stoker, Ian Holt, Good Book

Dracula The Un-Dead

Dacre Stoker

Dracula The Un-Dead

Dacre Stoker

Dreadful. A pathetic use of a great work as basis for trash.

30th August 2010

This has to be one of the worst sequels ever produced. The writers seem not to have actually read Bram Stoker's book. They've made John Seward a morphine addict who's spiral into the role of shabby vampire hunter is due to his years of pining for Lucy. There's no mention, in the first few pages at least, of what happened to the happy marriage he enjoyed at the end of "Dracula".

The writers of this book also seem to have lost track of their map of England, or again, forgotten to read the original book. They've moved Dr. Seward's asylum (and presumably Carfax Abbey) from Purfleet near London quite a few miles north to Whitby in Yorkshire. A confusing piece of literary license at the least.

The most blatant offense is in the style of writing. This novel was purported to have picked up where "Dracula" left off. It seems more to have picked up where one of the Blade movies left off. Bram Stoker's novel was filled with horror but short on graphic, wanton violence and explicit sexuality - which left those aspects of the action to the imagination of the reader. This work plunges immediately into cruel torture and what seems to me excessive detail and glamorization of evil. Dr. Seward, once a hero and noble man is reduced to voyeurism and cowardice.

I stopped reading somewhere around page 5, I believe. Bram Stoker's book was a tale of goodness, virtue and faith overcoming evil. I think it unlikely that this book would rise to such a theme when the first scenes focus on cruelty and degradation and clearly serve to entice a modern mentality and appetite for pornography and violence.

To the writers I say this: Write what you will, sell what you like. Shame on you for using Bram Stoker's art and characters as bait. To true fans of the original "Dracula" I say: Don't waste your money or time. This will not appeal to you.

Absolutely Terrible Book ---AVOID---

05th August 2010

If you enjoyed the original, please know that this "sequel" utterly murders it. It was a terrible read, and I really can't say anything positive about it. SKIP IT

Good Bad and Ugly describe this book

04th July 2010

First off, allow me to say that Bram Stoker's Dracula is my absolute favorite piece of fiction, and always has been since I first read it at 14. Its first-person-perspective account of bewildered heroes, atmospheric terror and powerful images are what inspired me to become a horror writer myself. Few books even merit mentioning in the same sentence for me. So when I saw that a relative of Bram had written an 'official' sequel, I was elated to the point of bursting. When I collected the book from the library for a trial run I read it insatiably and non-stop. A quarter way through, I was intrigued. Halfway through, I was somewhat pleased, if not saddened at the deaths of certain characters from the original. At the three-quarter mark, my enthusiasm waned almost completely, as logical succession dictated to my mind what trajectory the story was taking. By the last hundred pages, I was certain about the finale, and of course it was so. I was disgusted. Allow me to elaborate.

The writing of the book is not at all bad, by contemporary standards. Its a bit graphic when it comes to sex and violence, but that is what sells these days. I won't fault the man on that, or his literary style either, which was quite page-turning and intriguing. What bothered me was what I perceive as a jettisoning of the factual matters of the original book and its characters, in favor of a contemporary, 'cool' conception of what it means to be a vampire. Dracula was evil in the first Stoker novel, plain and simple. He didn't 'love' Mina, as he had in Coppola's film, and I always held a gripe against the director for romanticizing his seduction of Mrs. Harker. Yet in this 'sequel', all the facts of the first book are rewritten and whitewashed- it was Van Helsing's lack of knowledge about transfusions that killed Lucy, not the 'demon' Dracula, who'd tried to save her. Mina willingly lost her virginity to Drac, rather than him forcing her to drink the blood from his chest. This results in Jonathan's lifelong torture and insecurity. "The man that takes a woman's virginity always lives closest to her heart," he overhears in a pub. And this is quite true for poor Harker, who is well aware that that his sexual prowess is naught compared to that of his adulterous wife's 'dark prince' for whom she longs nightly. The new antagonist is Countess Bathory of Hungary, not the Count, who is whitewashed to the point of being called God's Champion- completely misunderstood in the first novel. Really? Are you serious? We are treated to an alternate history of the first novel's events, (more reminiscent of once more of Coppola than of Stoker) wherein Dracula comes to England not to found a vampire empire but to stop Bathory, who turns out to be Jack the Ripper. Now understand something. I understand, but completely detest the modern idea of the cool, handsome, seductive vampire, as opposed to the monster of Stoker's 1898 novel, and of the Nosferatu movies. Whenever I come across a modern version of the vampire (like Twilight or Underworld) I re-read Dracula to get a refreshing throwback to what's really good. And now up comes this book, that turns my favorite villain of all time into (what else?) a cool, loving, honorable, and artistic vampire, fighting God's good fight. The book treats Harker with utter disdain, a relic of a past age, for daring to be upset that his wife cheated him and still longs for her lover. I almost felt relief when he was brutally killed; after all, he and his archaic jealousy got in the way of Mina and Dracula's true love, and I'm a hopeless romantic! It turns Van Helsing into a weak, egoistical, old man that betrayed his closest friend's trust. Holmwood and Seward are treated, marginally, a bit better and with more dignity. Quincey is Luke Skywalker. Remember that. Worst of all, Mina, the epitome of a loving and tender woman victimized by a vile creature, is now a 'strong' 'modern' type of woman, that would not even weep for her dead husband, for fear of appearing weak in front of police. With Jonathan still warm in his grave she submits sexually first to Bathory, then to Dracula. By the end of the novel, I held not a single iota of identification with her. I cheered when her son Quincy turned his back on her, after her conscious decision to become a full vampire, so as to remain at Dracula's side forever, declaring that the 'monster' had destroyed his family. I'm certain that youthful readers will cheer Dracula and Mina's eternal love, but the original Dracula wasn't a love story. It was a horror story, and a damn good one. Why? Because its six or seven protagonists were innocent and blind to the evils of the supernatural, which Dracula represented, and exposed them to. To make Mina, the gentle flower of the original, into a willing accomplice, and Dracula into the hero (if only we'd seen his true motives all these years reading the original) is insulting. Summation. I thoroughly enjoyed this book until intuition and common sense informed me where it was all going. If you understand it not as a true sequel, but a modern teenybopper take and twist on an old classic, you'll come out just fine. If you want justice done the original, and all its characters, wait till someone that loves Bram Stoker's seminal book, Dracula, to write one.