"Twenty-five years have passed since the band of heroes destroyed Dracula at his castle in Transylvania. Since then, Jonathan and Mina Harker have raised their son Quincey into a fine, if at times naïve, young man, even while their once happy marriage disintegrated. Dr Seward, the brilliant physician, is plagued by drug abuse and mania. Arthur Holmwood, the brave and dashing fiancé to Lucy, is now full of anger and regret. And Van Helsing, leader of the brave band, is a sickly old man.
When Quincey leaves law school to pursue his dream of acting, he stumbles upon a troubled production of the play Dracula. This play, with its oddly familiar characters and directed by one Bram Stoker, plunges the young man into the world of his parents’ terrible secrets, but before her can confront them he meets evil that rocks him to his core.
One by one, the band of heroes that defeated Dracula is being hunted down. Could it be that Dracula somehow survived and is seeking revenge all these years later? Or, is another, far more sinister villain at work who will put anyone associated with Dracula, including Quincey in grave danger."

OK, there are quite a few things about this book that could actually make it work as "the sequel to the original classic" if the authors (a Stoker relative and a screen writer) weren't so undecided on what they're writting about.
Yes, they do try to justify the novel itself in an extensive Afterword but basically end up shooting themselves in the foot a few times (with a shotgun). The authors tried to mesh the Dracula from the original novel with the Hollywood Dracula (a different vampire altogether) and that makes no sense, if the purpose was (as they claim) to continue the original Stoker's novel. In the end it all comes down to a question of copyright ownership by the Stoker family and it's sad that they had to go through all this to regain it.
Being a fan of the original novel I was quite curious to see where this "official sequel" would take the story and... like we all know, curiosity killed the cat.
I doubt very much that Bram Stoker would ever approve of this Dracula spin off being called a sequel to his story, mainly because the sequel ends up saying that the original was not only not that good but it also contained a lot of errors, which this sequel repudiates and tries to correct messing it even more.
So, as a sequel, this book is utter rubbish but as a spin off from the Dracula myth it's not all that bad.
The action is set in 1912 but the original story was moved from 1893 to 1888 and so it starts a roller coaster of Hollywood style fast paced action, a thin plot, some free sex scenes with little or no relation to the narrative and historical references thrown in just for the heck of it (it goes from the Jack, the Ripper murders to the Wright brothers first flight to the launch of the Titanic).
The supporting characters are not fully developed and the main character ends up being Countess Erzebeth Bathory and not Dracula.
The way the story is told also lacks in originality, the reader is always being told what is happening and does not get the chance to experience it for himself (you'll get what I'm saying when you read it) and it's not even well written.
That being said, here's what's interesting in this spin off... Bathory! That's one great villain! Even though there is a lot of Hollywood in the way the whole story is set up, the countess certainly takes the prize as one brilliant villain through the whole novel. The hero, Quincey, is a lame character, poorly constructed and barely interesting.
There are a few elements the authors added in order to try to explain too much of the original novel and that ends up taking from the novel instead of adding (the virus-like blood is one of them).
In the end this might turn out to be an interesting movie, it's not a terrible Dracula spin off but, most definitely, it is not a sequel.

RABCK

Recebido e na lista de livros para ler em breve.
Obrigado Kizmiaz...

Depois do o ler pode ser que o mande à vida dele :) também não vale a pena ficar na prateleira a ganhar pó...