Draculas

Written by: Jack Kilborn, Blake Crouch,   F. Paul Wilson,  Jeff Strand
Published by:  Joe Kornrath andCreateSpace
Page Count: 326 pages
File Size: 859 KB
ISBN-10: 1456331183
ISBN-13:  978-1456331184
ASIN: B0042AMD2M
Where to buy: Amazon,  Barnes & Noble, and other fine book retailers

Publisher’s comments:

A DYING MAN’S GREATEST TREASURE…

 Mortimer Moorecook, retired Wall Street raider, avid collector, is losing his fight against cancer. With weeks to live, a package arrives at the door of his hillside mansion—an artifact he paid millions for…a hominoid skull with elongated teeth, discovered in a farmer’s field in the Romanian countryside. With Shanna, his beautiful research assistant looking on, he sinks the skull’s razor sharp fangs into his neck, and immediately goes into convulsions.

OPENS THE DOOR TO AN ANCIENT EVIL…

A rural hospital. A slow night in the ER. Until Moorecook arrives strapped to a gurney, where he promptly codes and dies.

WHERE DEATH IS JUST THE BEGINNING.

Four well-known horror authors pool their penchants for scares and thrills, and tackle one of the greatest of all legends, with each writer creating a unique character and following them through a vampire outbreak in a secluded hospital.

Enjoy!

Floyd

OK… where to start?

*deep breath*

Well, OK then. Let’s start with the bottom line. Draculas is a brilliant, roller-coaster, chill-inducing read. It is a novel that knows what it wants to be and sets out to be exactly that, no holds barred and no apologies offered. If you like horror, if you like vampires with no sparkles on, then you should read it. There: now you have it. End of story.

Still with me? Good! Because it is the “why?” behind the success of this novel that is what makes it really, really interesting .

Draculas worked for me on three separate but often intertwining levels.

First and foremost, Draculas  appealed to the reader in me, the guy who grew up as a kid loving the old classic horror movie monsters, the guy who (as I have reported before) wants his vampires to be vicious and unnatural and scary as Hell itself.  In his afterward to the novel, publisher Joe Kornrath (who is also co-author of this book under the pseudonym Jack Kilborn) says that there “aren’t too many balls to the wall monster books being done anymore”. This novel, whose subtitle is “A Novel of Terror”, promises up front to return us to those days and it does so faithfully and marvelously, delivering a story with the pace of a bullet.  In previous reviews, I have revealed myself to be something of an introduction fanatic and the intro to Draculas  is designed to play to that need for a quick hook. Unlike a lot of stories that hook you quickly and then pull back, Draculas just keeps heading on down the road at a break neck pace and never looks back. The action is captivating, the characters are remarkably entertaining and believable, and  the story is engaging . In fact, the only real criticism that I have of the novel is in this last area, one that a lot of horror stories and movies suffer from when we don’t really want them to be over: the ending left me wanting more.

The second perspective from which I found Draculas a fascinating read is from the perspective of  a collector. (OK, a fanboy….) Konrath says in his afterward that, in the Kindle version of the book, there are a “bunch of DVD-style extras that  don’t increase the cost of the ebook”. Like a DVD of a beloved movie, this book contains deleted and re-edited scenes that give a reader a behind the scenes look at the creation of the story as well as four extra short stories from the authors. Once the story is done here, all of these extras give you a completely different realm to dive in to.

Which leads me to the last and maybe the most interesting thing that captivates me about this novel: there is a four way interview with the authors at the end of the book and that along with a generous sampling of the email that they exchanged while writing  Draculas  gives a fascinating insight into the process of writing in general and collaboration in particular. Now, I don’t know if everyone will be as excited about this as I was but, since I am a teacher of writing and a self-confessed writing geek, I was overjoyed. I think that I learned as much if not more from this part of the book as I have learned in many professional seminars that I have attended.

Final Thoughts:

All in all, Draculas  is a extraordinarily satisfying book in many different respects. It is almost sure to please lovers of horror and devotees of the writing craft equally. And there is not a single sparkle to be seen. I give this the rarest of ratings, six full tentacles, and my deepest wish that the crew behind the book will write a sequel soon…

Floyd Brigdon, Assistant Editor/Columnist/Reviewer