Stoker's Manuscript

I keep reading horror novels because the description of the book sounds so great, but I'm often disappointed (except with Steven King, and now his son, Joe Hill). Therefore I was pleasantly surprised with Stoker's Manuscript, which takes on the Dracula legend with an original idea and hits all the stops just right. It's creepy, suspenseful, and at times even scary.

Written by first-time author Royce Prouty, who clearly knows both Bram Stoker's novel and the history that inspired it, Stoker's Manuscript is narrated by Joseph Barkeley, who is an antiquarian book dealer living in Chicago. He and his brother, a priest, were both Romanian orphans. He is contacted by a go-between of a mysterious client who wants him to authenticate a prologue and epilogue of Dracula.Who is it, and why? Only the son of Vlad the Impaler, who needs the information to find the tomb of his wife (she's also a vampire).

The plot is a bit of a labyrinth and I may not have caught everything, but Prouty's real skill is adopting a Gothic tone. We get some lightheartedness--Barkeley is a Cubs fan, which you don't learn in too many vampire books-- but mostly this book is as dark as a night in the Carpathians. Most of the book is set there, and Barkeley meets not only Dalca, that son, who's been living for over 500 years, but his brother Radu, who may be even worse. Dalca has acquired his father's hobby of throwing people onto spikes, and reading about this, even without seeing it, is grisly.

I have no idea if Prouty has even been to Romania, but it feels like he has. At least he's probably been to Castle Bran (by the way, this castle is now for sale. Darn that I don't have the do-re-mi to buy it). "But no matter one's placement in the Bran Valley, your eyes always drew upward to the huge medieval structure sculpted directly out of stone, Castle Bran, otherwise known as Dracula's Castle and he setting of the original Dracula novel. It looks as if a great solid rock disrobed under chisel, revealing a high-walled Gothic edifice underneath, its complicated roofline of red tile, and for uneven steepled corners." This castle is on my bucket list of places to go.

Barkeley is an interesting hero in that he constantly makes mistakes. He undergoes many trials--he's attacked by some sort of lupine creature, beset by Dalca's "regulats," who are his vampires, I guess, watches all those impalings, and is tossed into a tomb and sealed into it. All of this makes for white-knuckled reading, although I found the climax a little disappointing.

For Dracula fans this a must-read and, while not as important a novel as Dracula, is right up there in terms of genuine frights.