Dracula the Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker & Ian Holt is a mediocre book

Words cannot describe how awful this book is, but I’ll give it a try. The authors basically say that everything in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is wrong. Vampires don’t fear crosses. They’re not villainous. Dracula wasn’t a villain, he was a good guy. Dracula didn’t die as outlined in Bram Stoker’s novel but somehow survived turning into dust, only to die a horribly-written and ridiculous death in Dracula the Un-dead. Mina Harker didn’t hate Dracula, she loves him and had an affair with him back when they were trying to hunt him in Bram Stoker’s novel?! Are you f\*\*\*\*\*\* kidding me?!

To boot, the authors make Bram Stoker a character in this novel, and they kill him! It really seems like Dacre hated his distant relative and was trying to slander his masterpiece. The fight scenes are also hilariously bad, and mostly consist of people throwing other people across rooms over and over again. Where Bram’s masterpiece is foreboding and terrifying, this book is never once even remotely scary. It fails fundamentally to even remotely resemble Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The writing also tried to be somewhat elegant and sometimes used words from the early twentieth century, but then slipped horribly past the halfway point, as if the authors stopped trying. Once they referred to a man riding in the front of a horse-drawn carriage as “riding shotgun”. Early in the novel there are also lots of historical references to buildings and events, making the book feel well-researched, but later in the book these completely disappear in favour of terrible writing right out of a B-movie script, further proving the authors gave up past the halfway point of the book.

Disgraceful, ridiculous, horribly written, and above all insulting to Bram Stoker, his masterpiece, and vampire mythology in general, Dracula the Un-dead may just be the worst book ever written.

by Pandora_box_Hesiod