BELA LUGOSI JR. PRESENTS: NIGHT OF DRACULA

By: Francesca Sorenson
Date: Tuesday, October 09, 2001

NIGHT OF DRACULA is being released concurrently with another Schildt tie-in novel called FRANKENSTEIN, THE LEGACY. The two volumes will show up in stores simultaneously this month as a Halloween commemoration of classic horror. Schildt's FRANKENSTEIN can definitely be highly recommended, as a strong literary follow-up to the original. Unfortunately, Schildt's version of DRACULA cannot be reviewed with as much enthusiasm.

The novel is set in modern-day Atlanta, Georgia. A local doctor is asked to help out by police in Columbus who have a string of murders involving single puncture wounds to the neck. Coincidentally, this same doctor, while at the opera, meets a Romanian national named Vladamir Tepevich. By further coincidence, this doctor has brought a friend to the opera who looks hauntingly like Tepevich's long lost wife. By further, further coincidence, this very same doctor treats a patient named Renfield, who mysteriously becomes Tepevich's servant.

While autopsying one of the puncture wound victims, our doctor is confronted by a foreign physician named Van Helsing. Dr. Van Helsing is a disease specialist on loan to the Center for Disease Control from the University of Stockholm. Van Helsing indicates that the murders are being committed a vampire, most likely one named Dracula. Vampires are not mystical creatures, but actually people with a rare blood disease, that gives them amazing strength, sensitivity to sunlight, and also superpowers. In a deeply shocking turn of events, investigations reveal that Tepevich is really Dracula.


Dracula was a doctor in his small Transylvanian town when loggers moved in to deforest the surrounding countryside. With the loggers came a tent city...and a brothel. The women in the brothel gave the whole town a rare venereal disease. Dr. Dracula found a cure for the disease, but that cure gave him his vampiric condition. Now he must kill people to get enough blood for all his transfusions. Dracula's in Atlanta to find his lost wife, whom he believes is the doctor's friend. Now the doctor and Van Helsing must hunt down Dracula, and save the damsel in distress.

Sound convoluted? It is. And it's a little hokey, built on amazing amounts of coincidence. But it isn't all bad. In fact, Schildt pulls out a surprise ending that really makes the story redeem itself. Also, the author has a breezy style that gives the prose a fun, exciting life.

The fact that Bela Lugosi Jr. "presents" the novel would seem to mean that it's a follow up to the 1931 film version of DRACULA, which stared Lugosi's father, rather than any other given incarnation of the DRACULA story. However, the plot in no way reflects that film. In fact, it seems only by coincidence that the character in the novel has the name "Dracula" at all. He can't possibly be the same Dracula from Stoker's book, since that Dracula was a supernatural being.

Also, Schildt set the book in Atlanta, but took little time to research the city. He makes many mistakes, like basing plot points on the fact that his main character can travel quickly between Atlanta and Columbus, even though it'd be geographically impossible for him to do so. Schildt sets scenes in a huge opera house, the likes of which does not exist in the city. And all of Schildt's Atlanta police officers constantly refer to the CDC as "Atlanta's Center for Disease Control". Not only is that not the center's real full name, but these must also be pretty dense cops if they have to constantly remind each other of which city houses the CDC.

If you only get the chance to pick up one of Schildt's two Halloween offerings, FRANKENSTEIN, THE LEGACY should be the one. It's a smart novel that's far superior to NIGHT OF DRACULA. If, however, you're very invested in the DRACULA mythos, you could do worse than to give NIGHT OF DRACULA a read. It may not offer complete literary satisfactionbut a strong ending and an imaginative approach could make it of some interest.

NIGHT OF DRACULA

Grade: C+

Author(s): Christopher Schildt

Publisher: Pocket Books

Price: $6.99