Dracula : Asylum

This book is much better than anyone would expect. Published by Dark Horse, better known for their fantastic comic books, this sequel to Universal's Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, is surprisingly engaging and well written. Set during World War I, twenty years after the defeat of Dracula by Van Helsing, Dracula: Asylum explores themes of madness, repression, and betrayal. Seward's sanitorium from the original has become a hospital for shell-shocked soldiers. And author Paul Witcover does a remarkable job of correlating the madness and depravity of the war with the evil of Dracula, just as the earlier masterpiece, Nosferatu linked the evil of the vampire with the plagues that ravished Europe. Witcover introduces several new characters, including female psychiatrist Lisa Watson, her shell-shocked patient suffering from amnesia Captain Faulks and the hospital's sinister head doctor, sadistically obsessed with electroshock therapy. Dracula: Asylum is certainly not the most brilliant or original horror story, but it holds its own as an intriguing, entertaining continuation of the movie Dracula, more than worth a glance on a stormy night.

I likely never would have picked this book up because the movie tie-in would have discouraged me. Lucky for me, then, that my sister recommended it or I would have missed out on one of the surprise literary pleasures of my year. I finished it on just three day's subway rides and missed my stop on one of them because I was too deep inside to realize I'd blown past Flatbush. Then I ended up letting another train go by to make sure I'd finish the last few pages I had left, standing there on a pretty drafty platform for another half-hour, unable to stop reading. Initially, I thought I might enjoy the horror-thriller part of the book and did - genuine chills there, which I don't usually get when reading no matter what those "will send shivers up your spine" back-cover reviews usually say. But what carried me away was the war story. I can't imagine the amount of research that made those passages read like such a true and gut-wrenching account but it was the best kind, the kind that doesn't show itself off. Everything was in service to the action, which was relentless, horrifying and moving. Those were incredibly gripping chapters and they give the story soul, exactly what's needed to balance the more fantastical darkness of the classic Dracula myth. But even the myth was reinvented and made fresh and truly scary. For once Dracula's power over everyone doesn't feel like a cartoon seduction but like some kind of elemental characteristic, as if an evolutionary byway had been taken. It didn't hurt that the female lead had real heft for once. Fair warning: You'll also want a friend to read it so you can talk about the revelation at the end with someone. That's why my sister suggested that I read it, as it turned out! Very tricky.

I love pretty much anything with Vampires, and this such an inventive book! There's a great running gag regarding the Count's accent. Two of the characters think he sounds Hungarian. I died laughing! The Count remains the best dressed undead creature around, and he's looking for a new girlfriend. You just KNOW there's going to be trouble!

I didn't expect a lot when I purchased Dracula: Asylum. It's the first book from Dark Horse Press, an offshoot of Dark Horse Comics, and it is a franchise property of Universal Pictures...a sequel to the Lugosi Dracula, not the Bram Stoker novel on which the Lugosi film was based. All of this lent me pause, but being a fan of the original film, I took a chance. All I can say is this book is better than it has any right to be. I don't imagine that the fat men in suits at Universal had anything like this novel in mind when they okayed the concept of a new print franchise. Paul Witcover has provided us with interesting, complex characters, an unexpected set of subplots, and compelling prose. Despite the fact that his Dracula isn't a carbon copy of Lugosi's, I found him frightening in a way that most onscreen portrayals never approach. For the first time in my experience, Dracula is portrayed as truly scary in the real world...not in a comic book way, but in a visceral, spiritual way. If you are a fan of vampire fiction, you can't do much better than this. Anne Rice has pages and pages (and pages) of descriptive text and Laurell Hamilton has devolved into writing mostly porn, but neither has written anything as compelling as this chilling tale.

This book is superb! Fans of Bela Lugosi will find this book to be quite a treat. If you have not seen the 1931 version of Dracula, I highly recommend that you check it out; the book is a sequel to that movie. It is in some respects a combination of Dracula and All Quiet On the Western Front. Some of the most frightening aspects of the book take place when Faulks, a traumatized veteran of World War I, recalls the horrors of trench warfare. The book clearly shows that human beings can be the most terrifying monsters around. As Dracula said, "There is no evil so great that it does not exist in the human heart." On another level, though, it is a story of great courage as the protagonists band together to battle the fiendish count.