sevenspiders - reviewed on 1/21/2009 + 73 more book reviews

Helpful Score: 3

This book is much better than it has any right to be. Published by Dark Horse, better known for their fantastic comic books, this sequel to Universal's Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi, is surprisingly well written.

Set during World War I, twenty years after the defeat of Dracula by Van Helsing, Dracula: Asylum explores themes of madness, repression, and betrayal. Seward's sanitorium from the original has become a hospital for shell-shocked soldiers. And author Paul Witcover does a remarkable job of correlating the madness and depravity of the war with the evil of Dracula, just as the earlier masterpiece, Nosferatu linked the evil of the vampire with the plagues that ravished Europe.

Witcover introduces several new characters, including female psychiatrist Lisa Watson, her shell-shocked patient suffering from amnesia Captain Faulks and the hospital's sinister head doctor, sadistically obsessed with electroshock therapy.

Dracula: Asylum is certainly not the most brilliant or original horror story, but it holds its own as an intriguing, entertaining continuation of the movie Dracula, more than worth a glance on a stormy night.

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