So what does a girl do when she has a ton of work to do for finals?
If you said update a blog that is severely neglected, you’re right! If you didn’t, you probably said watch porn which is a great second choice. Sadly any other answer is just unacceptable.
Speaking of unacceptable things…
I assume we’re all familiar with Bram Stoker and Dracula. I’m also going to go right ahead and assume you all love it just as much as I do. It is easily a book I can recommend to everybody and promise you will love it (if you don’t love it, I apologize for your lack of taste and my lack of understanding of different opinions). Oh, how I wish this review were for that amazing work. Actually I wish it were for ANY amazing work. But no, this review is for something so horrid, I don’t even want to tell you so you don’t expose yourself to it.
I will though, just so you might be able to suffer with me.
Dracula
The Un-Dead
No… just, so so so sooooo much NO. I went into this several different kinds of excited and I was left bitter and angry at the world. This book successfully made it onto the list of books I couldn’t finish out of contempt. That also means this review will be fairly short.
This novel destroyed everything its predecessor created: the amazing characters, the chilling accounts of horror, a plot that didn’t have more twists than a M. Night Shyamalan movie about plot twists…
Let’s start with the characters. Remember how in Dracula, Jonathan and Nina were young, in love, and willing to face the evil that was Dracula? Or how Jack Seward was a brilliant doctor with a name for himself? Or how Arthur faced his undead fiancée to bring her peace? Or Van Helsing, a man of knowledge with a kind heart?
Now take all of them and do a complete 180 with their personalities. Jack Seward is reduced to a drug addict with nothing to his name other than the occasional vampire hunt, Jonathan becomes a drunk who hates his wife and sleeps with prostitutes on a regular basis (is hated by his own son), Nina is an un-aging woman with such a high expectation of sex set by her first time it can never be matched, Arthur (from what I can tell) is useless and has an empty marriage, and Van Helsing is old, frail, and willing to do something unspeakable to avoid death.
Apparently Hannibal Lecter fears the Grim Reaper.
What. A. Mess. For the record and to fill my spoiler quota, Jack and Jonathan both die fairly early into the book so I can only give them so much hate. According to this mess Stoker forget to tell readers that Mina had sex with Dracula, causing her to become insatiable in bed and partially psychic, as well as immortal. He also forgot to mention that these characters, who knowingly faced death to end Dracula, would be reduced to paranoid shells of themselves in a few years.
Since I didn’t get through the entire book, I did have to do some research and found that wasn’t the only outrage: Dracula is not dead and is in fact a misunderstood monster who never meant to hurt anybody except evil vampires. Evil vampires like the new villain, Countess Bathory, who just happens to be a lesbian vampire that kills two of our heroes and has sex with Nina because hey, lesbian vampire sex. Oh, and the baby the Harker’s had at the end of Dracula? Yeah, that’s Nina’s and Dracula’s baby, Quincey, who gets taken under the wing of a popular actor who turns out to be Dracula. When this is let out by Van Helsing, you’d think it’d be time for some major vampire murder like last time… Oh no, in yet another twist it turns out Van Helsing is now a vampire, and in a scuffle he and Arthur both die.
You’ll have it soon, promise.
After some more crazy with extra stupidity the big showdown between Bathory and Dracula commences, but not before Dracula insists Mina become a full vampire so she can fight should he be defeated. Fight fight fight, pointless garbage claiming Bram left out parts of his story, and then we have the ending, which results in Bathory being defeated, Nina and Dracula dead, and Quincey pulling a Simba and running far away and never returning. Not that I can blame the guy.
If you’re not lost in that maze of complete garbage I just typed, congrats. You now get to know that Bram Stoker was actually a character in this novel, one who was given the idea for his play Dracula by Van Helsing and is also a partial diva/play director (or something like that. Blind rage made it hard to see the words).
The novel is just a disaster. Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt took everything from the original and basically said it was wrong, then turned it into a mess of depressing twists and turns lined with sex and highly erratic writing that is sometimes hard to follow.
And by write a book about it, she means “burn this place to the ground.”
To give it a small positive note, it does include a little bit of history, such as information regarding Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory, but that’s about it. This would work wonderfully as satire for Dracula, and I only got as far as I did because I was hoping that would be the case, but no such luck. I honestly think this was just Dacre’s way of trying to cash in on his namesake and Holt just came along for the ride. The bad news for them is they failed miserably.
Rating: -985/10
Don’t read it. Your brain will melt out of your ears and nose. It’s not worth it.
I was the historical researcher for ‘Dracula the Un-Dead’ and was there throughout the whole messy process. There were too many cooks in that kitchen and it was certainly a learning experience. Your review, comments and rating made me laugh. Thanks I needed that.
This is probably the best book review I’ve ever read, and I thank you for the warning!
Thanks so much!
And of course–I couldn’t live with myself knowing people might read this mess and I hadn’t even tried to stop it.
[...] that horrible Dracula sequel I reviewed a few months back? That was rough. Really really rough. And I thought it was only going [...]