SEPT - The Bone Season

September review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon, 2013. [Dystopia category]

It's a rare moment when I buy hardcover full-price. Shiny, intriguing covers help.

Wiling away the hours in our newest hip bookstore last month, I was trying desperately to find a book that would fit my dystopia category. I went through classics lists on the internet, debated H.G. Wells and Isaac Asimov, but ultimately went outside to sit on the curb, anxious and tomeless, redoubling my internet efforts on my tiny phone screen. On a whim, I had picked up the IndiePicks! newsletter for the month as I was leaving Literati, and I thumbed through it looking for catchwords that might possibly mean "containing post-apocalyptic oppressive society." The stark blue cover of The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon struck me, even in thumbnail form, and as I read through the blurb I became more and more excited about it. Luckily, I hadn't gone but four steps from Literati, so I turned around and walked back inside and on whim, bought a $26-hardcover-new-realease from a 22-year-old British author and walked back out. (There aren't words to explain how rarely I do such a thing. I suffer from a double dose of inherited Jewish stinginess and buyer's anxiety, so such a splurge really spoke to me.) Immediately I sat down and started to read in the sun, hoping for anything to make my soul thrum with excitement again. It had been a while.

At first glance The Bone Season seems to be a typical sci-fi concept, the story of a singular individual built into an oppressive world whose skills make it dangerous for her to be there at all. (One girl in all the world, anyone?) Add some clairvoyance and a little bit of 1984 cross-bred with V For Vendetta and you've pretty much got The Bone Season. Paige Mahoney is a teenage clairvoyant living in 2059 London, a city that is now taken over by the terrifyingly closed-minded Scion (haha clairvoyance pun...sorry guys). Paige is a special kind of clairvoyant called a dreamwalker which essentially allows her spirit to leave her body to interact with the aether around her and even the minds of other people. This rare talent makes her a hot commodity in the rebel underground where she is employed by a rather pompous clairvoyant named Jaxon Hall. Her talent is untrained, though, and when forced into a corner Paige accidentally uses her power and kills two underguards, making her even more Most Wanted than usual. Her attempts to fly under the radar fail and she is captured and taken to what is essentially a concentration camp for her kind, called Sheol 1, built in the ruins of what used to be Oxford, and it is ruled by alien creatures called the Rephaim. Paige, being a special someone, is taken under the command of Warden, the blood consort and one who rarely consorts with humans. Isolated and confused, Paige has to learn to either adapt to this crushing new lifestyle or own her abilities enough to break herself and her newfound friends of the compound, all the while being tormented with gossip of faceless monsters, the Emim, who prowl just outside Sheol 1, snacking on a human limb here and some Rephaim blood there. Most of the story takes place within Sheol 1 and follows Paige's day-to-day traversal of her new life. Though the phraseology at times seemed a little too quaint and the final battle came rather quickly after so many pages of painstakingly detailed mind-jaunts, the novel as a whole was more than satisfying to me, due largely to the snarky female protagonist.

Paige is strong and bullheaded and ultimately very flawed, but her imperfections possibly make it easier for the reader to take her story as something to be heeded. The budding interest between Paige and her captor is interesting but also takes a backseat: it is not the point of the whole frame, as it would be in Twilight or some such work. Some critics have disparaged Paige as too self-absorbed and inconsiderate of others, obsessed with her gift but unwilling to push her limits, but I think the very fact that she has all these problems allow her to be a real human being, not a one-track-mind cyborg (*ahem* Bella) who can do nothing except chase a horribly toxic relationship with a horribly unavailable and dangerous individual. Our Paige is young and she messes up (a lot). She gets angry at Warden (not that he doesn't entirely deserve it) and gets into fights and spins out of control as she flails against the huge dystopian force that is Scion London.

Trying to find a book to read for dystopia was really interesting because it brought up a lot of questions and observations about the genre. Originally, I thought about doing Ender's Game for this month's category, but when I read the internet's thoughts on the matter, it seemed as if Ender was widely not considered dystopic because it takes place during the end of the world as the characters know it, rather than after. I feel that this is an unfairly specific restriction on dystopia because one could argue that it is never really the end of THE world but rather the end of A world. In this respect, I think Ender's Game could've worked nicely but I'm glad I chose The Bone Season because there's something about near-future radical regime shift stories that speaks to me lately. The Bone Season is at its core about exclusion. Parallels can be drawn to Holocaust tropes ("a humane means of removing clairvoyants from ordinary society" p402) or anti-gay propaganda (the pamphlet Jaxon writes is called On The Merits of Unnaturalness) or even vampire stories (at one point Warden drinks Paige's blood to restore him after he rebelliously gets his ass shredded by an Emim, not to mention that the Rephaim sleep during the day). But Shannon does not pedestal any of these threads, does not allow any singular one to become a watchword for her story. In this way, as well, I think it is derivative and silly to compare her to "the next J.K. Rowling." Allow her to be her own phenomenon, should her work deserve it. I myself am looking forward to seeing that it does.

Charts! I love charts!

The Bone Season is being hailed as everything from the next J.K. Rowling to the next Stephanie Meyer, and the reader reviews are just as varied. I truly enjoyed this book, thought it was new and full and a good first start. There were of course some failings, it being Shannon's first time out of the gate and all, but I don't think any of the comparisons both critics and publishers are making are fair to her--or anyone's--nascent talent. Being compared to such publishing powerhouses could automatically stunt Shannon's growth under all the pressure such completely different stories unfairly place upon her. To me, there were many things that were inspiring about this book, first and foremost that Samantha Shannon is 22 and published, an beacon of hope to me as an aspiring 22 year old writer who still only writes on her lunch break at the coffee shop. Her main character is a strong young woman who claws her way out of the world that was forced upon her. And her imagination is to die for. Being a lover of words, I was so excited to have a glossary in the back and a hierarchy of (vaguely defined) types of clairvoyants in the front. While many critics raked Shannon across the coals for "info-dumping" and unintelligible language, my heart leapt at the challenge of understanding not only this new world but the way it describes itself. I have been looking for a new world to jump into lately, and I think Samantha Shannon's The Bone Season just might do the trick.

Sleepy Hollow (2013): Meet Ichabod Crane with a Backbone

what a progression, huh?

The new Sleepy Hollow premiered on Fox tonight, created by sci-fi bigwigs Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. I've always loved Sleepy Hollow, from the bumbling Ichabod in the animated version to the screamy-fainty big-eyed Johnny Depp in Tim Burton's version. This sort of dark fantasy has always intrigued me, the beauty of it paired with the mystery of the unknown. I've read a lot of little tumblr review blurbs about the show to try to sort through how I feel about this new show, and a lot of it I've read from both camps is right in line with how I'm feeling. Mostly, I am intrigued, though, and that intrigue stems from all the threads Orci and Kurtzman are pulling in to shake up the story: some Revelations prophesy, a witchcraft undercurrent to everything you know about history, time-travel thrusting an ordinary human to a still-ordinary-but-different world (albeit 250 years in the future), among other things.

First of all, the main players. Abbie Mills, Ichabod Crane, the Headless Horseman, Katrina Crane--even the ones they killed off in the first episode (sorry, spoilers...). The relationships are well-developed and well-executed for the pilot of a new show, and enough of a plot surfaces to drive certain ones together and others apart. Abbie makes me me happy at my core, a strong [minority] woman in the lead role, in a place of [relative] power, who makes her own decisions and isn't obviously sexualized from the first second. The relationship established between her and Ichabod right away is one of understanding, of being an outsider, of being made to feel small without anything you can do to stop it. It is not romantic, it is not her being saved by him or swept off her feet She is confident in her capability, even when faced with things that shake her to her core, make her remember the day that broke a part of her. This man who has had such a history of unsurety and doubt, Ichabod Crane, finally has a backbone. He doesn't bumble like the animated one, and he isn't a scream away from a faint like Johnny Depp. He is impressively cavalier about accepting his fate, all the while adapting to 21st-century sarcasm while devoting himself to the task at hand, but he can't figure out how to open a car door. He's pretty scruffy and attractive, there's no doubting that, but somehow he was written with an actual personality to go with it! Flaws and everything! Even being supernaturally tied to a big scary axe-wielding mystery man doesn't seem to phase him. Granted, he is told that in a dream by his assumed-to-be-dead lovely wife Katrina. A strong, powerful GORGEOUS witch with bitchin red hair. She was, obviously, burned at the stake for witchcraft shortly after Ichabod "died" and is somehow still playing games that no one knows the rules to except for her and a few select members of different covens. I've heard angry hard-core feminist rants about her boobs being pretty prominent all the time but hey, 1780s fashion, amirite? A good décolletage was a girl's best friend, especially as a means of manipulation, and I am sure Katrina Crane was no stranger to getting her way by any means necessary. She was the one who cast the spell that bound her lover to the Headless Horseman, after all. Speaking of said Horseman, he is probably the most interesting twist on the old mythos: Death itself come again as one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and Sleepy Hollow is his battleground. Not to mention the fact that he's actually pretty good with an assault rifle.

The stories were made better by the cinematography, the general feel of the show. Even the corniest concept can be made great when treated with the right respect. The colors are brilliant and there is a really interesting use of camera angles, especially when heads are involved--or rather, camera perspectives. In one such moment, a beheading occurs and the camera is seemingly looking out of the eyes of the beheaded as it falls to the ground. I'm interested to see how they'll deal with the hell-characters aspect of the first season. The feel of the show was very similar to Grimm and Supernatural, with a touch of old X-Files believer/non-believer dichotomy.

The thing that I am nervous about was the heavy-handed insinuation of the general layout of the show: "Two witnesses brought together for a seven-year period of tribulations" -- I am nervous about this show getting ahead of itself before it figures out how to grow up and not be a corny little knockoff show that's too full of itself. However, I do enjoy the plan because it implies that there is, you know, a plan. . . this shouldn't end up like Lost that forgot what the hell it was doing by season 4. I am looking forward to following this show, if not religiously then academically, if you'll excuse the turn of phrase. There's the historical aspect that I like a lot, and the fictionalization of certain moments and persons from history itself really tickles my fancy. There is a beautiful use of sarcasm and fish-out-of-water humor, and a refreshing number of sassy remarks. But really, in the end, it just comes down to this:

I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE.

Find a spot where you are comfortable waiting

When I was talking to my family's financial advisor earlier this summer, he said something that struck me. He said that this is a hugely important transitional period in my life and if I don't know what I'd like to do yet, I should "find a spot where I am comfortable waiting." It struck me because I really think I have for the moment. I got this new promotion at the café, I'm writing more, applying to jobs; I have an amazing relationship with my boyfriend and my parents, I have a good new place to live, and a solid schedule to keep myself in check. The future is uncertain and scary but I am learning to cope, learning to write and get it out, while still allowing myself small happinesses. I have found my spot to be comfortable.

AUG - The Club Dumas

August review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 1996. [Historical Mystery category]

The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte is a an interesting novel. The main players all have shadows from great literature wound into their characters, and the main plot line hinges on the authentication of an old chapter of a Dumas manuscript, the line between reality and fiction ever blurring. Our protagonist--though not our narrator--is middle-aged cynic Lucas Corso, book detective, and we follow him on two seemingly intertwined errands: one for a fellow mercenary of the book industry in authenticating a lost manuscript chapter from The Three Musketeers; the other a mysterious side project for which he is being paid handsomely, researching a satanic book called The Book of the Nine Doors of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book that only has three known copies. As he follows the trails of clues from Spain to Sintra to Paris, his life becomes dangerously entwined with fiction in a way that he cannot get ahead of. The narrative power lies with a seemingly inconsequential character who fades into the background after a few acknowledgements, Boris Balkan, and this subtle omniscience helps to set the stage for the way the book is going to deal with its themes. His presence in the background almost causes the reader to not realize that Pérez-Reverte is constantly changing the rules of the story, leaving us as much in the dark as our dispassionate "hero" is. There are always characters around Corso that know more than he does, and as hard as he tries to gain their knowledge, he can never quite get there. Case in point is the mysterious girl Corso falls into line with, the girl with the striking green eyes who introduces herself as Irene Adler and gives no explanation to her part in the narrative. All the women especially have this one-step-ahead quality.

Speaking of young Irene, allow to indulge my favorite intellectual pastime and look at the lady characters! The three major players are Liana Taillefer, the Girl, and Baroness Frieda Ungern, each compared to an incredibly competent fictional figures: Milady de Winter from Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, Irene Adler from the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Miss Marple of Agatha Christie's mystery novels, respectively. These characters are surprising in all their respective stories, always self-confident and knowledgeable and ultimately capable of fulfilling their own agendas. It translates nicely to the three women in Corso's new whirlwind adventure.

The first one we meet is Liana Taillefer, widow of the publisher whose untimely death snarled all this business up. Liana is very obviously sexualized from the start, from our distant narrator taking advantage of her while she thought she was making a trade, to her apparent seduction of Corso's friend La Ponte (who hired Corso for the Dumas project in the first place). And then she is increasingly compared to Milady, a character from the very story she is trying to authenticate. Toward the end of the tale, the narrator brings up an interesting debate about the character of Milady,

Second is the Girl, the one with the striking green eyes who keeps showing up in Corso's line of sight, the one who unsmilingly deems herself Irene Adler. She is the young one, she represents youth, dispassionate knowledge, some sort of baffling protection. Corso ends up sleeping with her as well, but it isn't as easy as taking Liana Taillefer. The Girl speaks to Corso on a level that is lower than consciousness, than logical thought, but all the same a level that he needs as much as his constant imbibing of Bols gin.

Third but possibly most important is Baroness Frieda Ungern, the last stop on Corso's Nine Doors treasure hunt. Linked to brilliant and crafty Miss Marple, f all the owners of The Nine Doors, the Baroness is the most forthcoming, the most knowledgeable, most down-to-earth. She engages Corso more than any of the other owners of the Nine Doors, and her cult status as a witch intrigues him. She got the book from Madame de Montespan--another powerful, outspoken woman. There is history here out in the open, and Corso doesn't have to equivocate or break back in at night to absorb it. It was a meeting of the minds on an equal plane, and even though Corso held some things back, Baroness is no fool. She helped him more than the other two owners combined, and her wisdom helped Corso to solve the case eventually.

Not only did Pérez-Reverte take historical characters and events for his literary thriller, but he also mimicked the style of the very stories he used as his backdrop. I say this in terms of the format and tone Pérez-Reverte employs: The Club Dumas looks at serials like that of Dumas, including some substantial historical information about the rise of serials and the tendencies of Alexandre Dumas, père, and each chapter sort of feels like a chapter in a serial, ending with the sword looming ominously above the neck, an untold secret just come to light, a near-death experience. Sure it is a little disconnected, and you have to wait until the next page to realize what the characters have already pieced together, but I think it adds to the playfulness with which Pérez-Reverte deals with the idea of a serial. It's sort of a tongue-in-cheek appropriation of the style that lends itself nicely to the "historical mystery" category.

As for my overall opinion of the book? I enjoyed it, it was a nice change of pace. The last third of the book hit me almost at a jumble, with the coalescence of two different stories, and I was as confused as Corso when they didn't all fit together, but somehow it worked better for me. It reinforced the line between reality and fiction that had become so blurred throughout the novel. Apparently Roman Polanski fudged up that ending in his lifted The Ninth Gate (1999) starring Johnny Depp, but that's a different story.

Passive-aggressive post-its

There's nothing quite like coming into work--after steeling yourself for a shift you didn't want anyway--and the first thing you find is a scathing note about how bad a job you did at work last night. Why is my workplace the Mecca of passive aggressive post it notes? It makes everyone edgy and insinuates an undercurrent of defensiveness into all of your interactions; is she the one that thinks I do a terrible job sweeping? Does he have a problem with the way I put out cupcakes? Why are these such huge issues? Why can't people stop and think about what night the person you are writing this note to was having and be a little compassionate? I am more and more feeling anxiety-ridden by this basic, boring job. I need a change. Preferably one that doesn't know about post-it notes. 

Terrors from festivals past!

HEY EVERYBODY! The small film festival I work for, The Three Corpse Circus, is coming back for its fourth annual extravaganza on September 28, 2013! One of my brilliant co-conspirators whipped up this beauty as a little reminder of how awesome we've been before. Take a look at our past terrors!

The shorts featured are as follows (in order):

• Opstandelsen
  3CC Audience Choice Award Winner 2010
  Jawbreaker Productions
  Denmark
  Directed by Casper Haugegaard
  “Opstandelsen” brings the zombie apocalypse into the house of God.
• Green Glass Door
  Festival Choice Runner Up 2012
  Eye Candy Films
  Kentucky, USA
  Directed by Antonio Pantoja
  Will you solve the riddle? 6 strangers wake up to find themselves bound to their chairs by a sadistic killer. Each have a lone opportunity to solve the riddle. If they answer incorrectly, their fate is decided by their unique hint.
• Nursery Crimes
  Festival Choice Award Winner 2011
  United Kingdom
  Produced by Janice Aitken
  Little Bo Peep has slaughtered her sheep, and doesn’t know where to hide them.
• I was a Tranny Werewolf
  Directed by Lola Rock’N’Rolla
  New York, USA
  Vow to wax! as a young girl is teased for her excessive-body hair problem.
• Familiar
  Festival Choice Award Winner 2012
  Fatal Pictures
  Canada
  Written and directed by Richard Powell
  John is a simple man, he lives a simple life- in a mediocre house with his teenage daughter and his even simpler wife. If only contentment was equally as simple. John has an anger inside of him that has been growing for quite some time. His simple life and inner rage have become all too familiar and something is about to change.
• Blood Bunny
  Directed by Molly Madfis
  When they tried to write him out of his own holiday, one bunny went hopping mad!
• Revenge
  Out of Hand Films
  Michigan, USA
  Directed by Tim Malik
  Montel Stewart will find a tortuous end because of one man’s revenge.
• Refuge 115
  Best Scare Award Winner 2012
  Directed by Ivan Villamel Sanchez
  El Dedo en el Ojo S.L.
  Spain
  Directed by Ivan Villamel Sanchez
  March 18, 1938, the population of Barcelona is devastated by the continued indiscriminate bombing of fascist aviation. Jordi and Aina are a young couple in love who has not lost faith in salvation and freedom, and safeguard one of the many bomb refuges throughout the city of Barcelona. Something unknown is hidden in the darkness of the refuge, hidden and waiting to take one by one people are hidden from external danger. Aina and Jordi try to find a loophole for all those people, before the outputs are closed.
• The Zombie Factor
  Best of Fest Award Winner 2012
  Audience Choice Award Winner 2012
  Michigan, USA
  Directed by Matt Cantu
  The zombie apocalypse becomes REALITY on The Zombie Factor, the most dangerous show on television. Every episode, someone dies. The Zombie Factor puts contestants head-to-head against flesh-eating zombies. And on this reality show, as the people are eliminated, they become part of the stable of zombies and used against their fellow competitors.
• Predator/Prey
  Can of Chili Productions LLC
  New York, USA
  Directed by Kent Kitzman
  Eva (MARISA PIERINI) is away from home for the first time at a summer sleepaway camp. But, when violence erupts between the people in charge of her protection, she must perform a shocking act to ensure her survival.
• Backwater Gospel
  Best Scare Award Winner 2011
  The Animation Workshop
  Denmark
  Directed by Bo Mathorne
  As long as anyone can remember, the coming of The Undertaker has meant the coming of death. Until one day the grim promise fails and tension builds as the God fearing townsfolk of Backwater wait for someone to die.

JULY - Dracula the Undead

July review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2013: Dracula the Undead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt, 2009. [Action Adventure category]

I had bought Dracula the Undead when my beloved Borders was going out of business early last year (fun fact, that is also where/when I bought Drawing in the Dust, my March book!), but it has sat on my shelf ever since. Reading 'Salem's Lot jolted me back into my love of the vampire and I remembered I had this legitimate-looking sequel lying around, waiting for me to sink my fangs into once again. (To be clear, I don't really have fangs, I am not a vampire--though I have inherited some particularly pointy incisors from daddy dearest.) These are my thoughts!

The GIST. Dracula the Undead is the "true" sequel to the Bram Stoker's original Dracula, cowritten by Stoker's great-grandnephew and a Dracula documentarian/historian/screenwriter. According to the Author's note in the back, its intent was to reclaim the Dracula that Bram Stoker envisioned in his 1897 novel that has been co-opted, bastardized, and generally stolen by the popular media. The plotline fallows Quincey Harker, son of Mina and Jonathan Harker of Dracula fame, as he tries to follow his dreams of the theater--instead of his father's dreams for him of the Sorbonne--and how those dreams lead him back to the ancient evil his parents have been guarding from him his entire life. I liked the idea of a sort of next-generation attempt to reclaim the past, both in the fictional characters and the authors themselves, and it seemed to me a good, honest attempt at continuing Bram Stoker's legacy.

The CHARACTERS. Reprising their roles in Dracula the Undead are the brave band of heroes: Mina and Jonathan Harker, Arthur Holmwood (Lord Godalming), Abraham Van Helsing, and Jack Seward. (Get used to the phrase "brave band of heroes," because it comes up A LOT.) They are in various stages of denial and/or conflict about their involvement with Dracula in the past, and they have fallen away from each other--even Mina and Jonathan. Or should I say especially? New to the tale is our quasi-hero, next-gen Quincey Harker who is as-yet unaware of his dark parentage. He is the quintessential angry teen, hating his parents for forcing his life away from where he'd like it to go, and his relationships with said parents are very black-and-white: for a general but hugely plot-hole-y example, he quickly turns against his mother and judges her without the full story, all the while taking her word about his father and completely absolving said drunkard of any aforementioned misdeeds. Of course, the tale wouldn't come to fruition if Quincey was on his mother's side at the end. On the other side of the table is Countess Elizabeth Bathory, the new "absolute evil" come to London. She is our new Big Bad, but within the first 40 pages, we get her backstory of a loveless, abusive marriage and subsequent imprisonment. There is a feminine sympathy I found in the way she presents her tale, her own history in her own words--and this quality of allowing everyone their own voice is what pulls the characters in this novel up from the flatness of their ever-recycled prototypes. So often is Count Dracula portrayed as an infuriatingly black, evil character with no wiggle room. The original Dracula in Stoker's mind was an eloquent and complex antihero, and his apparent reincarnation here allows him his own voice again. This grey area the coauthors allow for the two vampires in order to examine the idea of "pure evil" is not extended to the human characters who, like Quincey as I mentioned before, are violently convinced one way or the other about what they think is right and wrong, which I think does a discredit to the characters Bram brought to life in his original.

One thing that has always intrigued me about the vampire was the incredibly sexualized nature these metaphysical beings seem to have taken on throughout the years, and this overt sexuality is very apparent here. Bathory is abused and then shunned for realizing her homosexuality and escaping her marriage, and that preference is continued on a wildly bloody scale to her actions as a vampire. Countess Elizabeth Bathory was said to have killed thousands and bathed in their blood orgiastically. True as that may be, its incorporation here offers a distinct dichotomy between her actions and the actions of the only other real female lead in the novel, Mina Harker. Their decisiveness and confidence is upsettingly linked to the vampire, the dark, which Mina eventually succumbs to under the guise of joining her one true lover. Ultimately the female characteristics of docile flirtatiousness are kept alive in the memory of pure Lucy Westenra while other, more self-actualized female traits are condemned with Bathory and Mina. Something that as a 21st century woman of higher education and relative broad-mindedness, I found hard to internalize.

In terms of ACTION ADVENTURE, the category I chose for this novel, I was not disappointed. It is most certainly an updated vampire tale, building off of the amalgamation of lore that has stacked up over the years while still trying to bring to light only the attributes Bram originally put forth in his novel. I didn't feel myself particularly tied to one character as my adventurer protagonist, though; granted Quincey is the newcomer whose understanding spurs on the climax, but all the characters seemed spread thin, and I didn't necessarily like any particular one of them (I hated Inspector Cotford though. So infuriatingly blind). In this respect, I think the "action adventure" trope falls short.

The RESEARCH. In retrospect, it could've also very well fit into historical mystery, mostly due to the real-life events and people the coauthors decided to lay their story over, like the Jack the Ripper murders and the Titanic maiden voyage. also in terms of the historical accuracy, the legacy being reclaimed, etc. (afterword by the coauthors). To get the full effect of this brilliant sequel, you need to read the afterword and the author's note. Something geeks like me love to do ;] I would love to be a historical fiction writer like this. The way these two men went about writing this book is so fascinating to me; it's one of the things that pushed me toward being a history major, an endeavor I ended up leaving due to the intensely factual nature of most history courses. Not that I don't like facts, but I learn better through stories, I've found. This story is an interesting confluence of research, fusing literature and the historical past to try to explain the unexplainable. It was more or less a fun read--except for wanting to skip over everything Cotford said ever--and I believe Dracula the Undead has deserved a place under the Stoker umbrella.