Dracul

Dracul- Dacre Stoker & JD Barker
G.P. Punam's Sons/ Penguin Group
Release Date: October 2, 2018

Rating:
📚📚

Warning: Potential Spoilers Ahead

Synopsis: It is 1868, and a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a desolate tower to face an indescribable evil. Armed only with crucifixes, holy water, and a rifle, he prays to survive a single night, the longest of his life. Desperate to record what he has witnessed, Bram scribbles down the events that led him here...

A sickly child, Bram spent his early days bedridden in his parents' Dublin home, tended to by his caretaker, a young woman named Ellen Crone. When a string of strange deaths occur in a nearby town, Bram and his sister Matilda detect a pattern of bizarre behavior by Ellen—a mystery that deepens chillingly until Ellen vanishes suddenly from their lives. Years later, Matilda returns from studying in Paris to tell Bram the news that she has seen Ellen—and that the nightmare they've thought long ended is only beginning.

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A young and sickly child, Bram Stoker is cared for by his sister Matilda and nurse, a young woman named Ellen Crone.  While Bram and Matilda love "Nanna Ellen" they are not blind to certain oddities about her- they never see her eat, she disappears for days at a time, and is the one who miraculously cures Bram when family doctors and modern medicine fail.  Once grown, Bram tries to forget the mysterious Ellen and the terrifying things he and Matilda saw, but when Matilda sees Ellen- looking exactly as she did twenty years ago- they know they won't be allowed to forget.  

The narrative of Dracul, like its' inspiration, Bram Stoker's Dracula, is told through multiple viewpoints. Through the journals of Bram and his brother Thornley, through Matilda's letters, we see events unfold.  These are interspersed with short "now' moments: Bram trapped in a tower, with something evil trapped on the other side of a door.  It takes until there are about 100 pages left in the book before the "past" catches up to "now" and we find out why Bram is in the tower and what is going on. 

The first two-thirds of Dracul focused on trying to building up suspense. While is shorter bursts this works, I have to admit that more than 300 pages of it seriously lowered my feelings of suspense, instead making me feel like I was being dragged through the book.  Is it Ellen who's threatening the Stoker family, or the mysterious, tall, dark stranger? What exactly are they being threatened with?  Who's on the other side of the door in Bram's tower? While the writing is clever enough to keep us guessing, I would have found the build up of suspense more satisfying if these questions had been answered earlier.  Instead it felt like an interminable build up that I was getting more bored by than anything else.  I also found the "now" writing- a present tense "he is doing this and seeing that" style- to be one I particularly detest (though that may be solely my own problem and not one that bothers other readers).

The last 100 or so pages of Dracul do make up for the crawling pace of the rest of the book.  Once we are finally in the "now" time and all the pieces are put together for us by Ellen, things start racing.  Hoping to outrace the evil Dracul, the Stokers and their convenient ally who just happens to know all about vampires travel to Germany.  Now suspense pays off and I found myself interested to know what would happen next.  By the very last page you are left with the rather creepy and confused questions of how much was fiction and how much fact in this version of Bram Stoker's life- a clever ploy by the authors to leave you thinking about Dracul long after you've finished the book.

Advertised as a prequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula, Dracula himself plays little part in the book and no additional questions about him are answered.  This is not his origin story but more a fictionalized origin story of how Stoker came up with the idea fo the book.  With the idea that this fictional 'biography' is the true story behind Dracula, readers will see plenty of parallels between the original book and this one.  The characters themselves, despite telling the story in their own words, are flat and one-dimensional; the writing style usually a rather over done mimicking of the classic gothic style of the original.  A much more streamlined book with stronger character development would have made it much more enjoyable for me.  While the ending bit left me liking Dracul more than I expected to (considering the slowness of most of it), I didn't find it a book I could overwhelmingly recommend to any but perhaps highly obsessive Stoker fans.    

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review