Book Review - J.S Barnes - Dracula's Child

 

Blurb:

It has been some years since Jonathan and Mina Harker survived their ordeal in Transylvania and, vanquishing Count Dracula, returned to England to try and live ordinary lives. But shadows linger long in this world of blood feud and superstition - and, the older their son Quincy gets, the deeper the shadows that lengthen at the heart of the Harkers' marriage. Jonathan has turned back to drink; Mina finds herself isolated inside the confines of her own family; Quincy himself struggles to live up to a family of such high renown. And when a gathering of old friends leads to unexpected tragedy, the very particular wounds in the heart of the Harkers' marriage are about to be exposed...

There is darkness both within the marriage and without - for, while Jonathan and Mina wrestle with the right way to raise a child while still recovering from the trauma of their past lives, new evil is arising on the Continent. A naturalist is bringing a new species of bat back to London; two English gentlemen, on their separate tours of the continent, find a strange quixotic love for each other, and stumble into a calamity far worse than either has imagined; and the vestiges of something thought long-ago forgotten is, finally, beginning to stir..

Strengths and Weaknesses:

Okay, before I start I have to be honest I really didn’t like this book.

I am very familiar with the original book ‘Dracula’ by Stoker and it is without doubt a complete success.

This book isn’t however one of them.

I really didn’t enjoy this book for a number of reasons..

1) The pacing. The book was 566 or so books and it felt like it too. I have nothing against long and some of my favourite books go on for much, much longer than this but there is enough movement to keep you engaged in a book, I struggled with this book throughout for that reason as it felt like it was constantly being padded out, when in reality it could have worked if it had being shorted a lot.

2) Unlike the original Dracula which followed a similar pattern, too much of the sections didn’t feel like the time zone they were trying to project for example the feature from the times on 06 December didn’t feel like proper journalism from the time first of all, and didn’t pull the story forward atall. I could have forgiven it if the voice has being constant in the book, but the tone of the book was very uneven throughout almost like the author hadn’t really thought about the voice they wanted to project in the book. The ideas were there, but it completely in failed in concept and execution and this also showed in some of the diary extracts which perhaps shouldn’t have done as diary entries owning to the amount of dialogue in them. Perhaps as Witness statements instead.

3) The Character Sarah-Ann Dowell was also wrote very worryingly and you could tell it was wrote by a male writer by the way too many male characters who are double her age desire her and this is also reflected of course in a different way by Quincey, the Harker’s Son.

4) I also had problems with  Ileana who appeared out of nowhere and whose motive to helping bring Dracula at best seemed very unclear at best and massively undeveloped.

5) I was concerned by Maurice Hallam and Gabriel Shone on the back of the cover it has be said and to be honest it seemed a bit too woke for my personal tastes and they didn’t nothing for me as new characters instead feeling a poor homage to Dorian Gray more than anything else.

6) Quincy, their son is underdeveloped and while I can understand why Jonathan Harker is haunted by what happened at Dracula’s castle, I found him very self pitying after a while and while I liked Nina, I felt much more could have being done in this book like Sarah-Ann Dowell and it was a clear example I didn’t think this writer was particularly any good at writing female characters.

Conclusion:

This is one of these books which I think with some proper thought and strong editing could well have a real success and I was left a little surprised that the Stoker estate firstly agreed to this and how weak the editing was in places. It is clearly a well thought book but it doesn’t work for all of the reasons above which is a shame as the book could have being a classic, but in this form it feels very half baked and not thought out properly.

A shame.

2/10.