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.
