The Dracula Dossier: A Novel of Suspense
by James Reese
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Book Summary Information
Author: James ReeseEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-10-07
ISBN: 0061233544
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: William Morrow
Book Reviews of The Dracula Dossier: A Novel of Suspense
Book Review: Another great experiment in prose style
Summary: 5 Stars
The Dracula Dossier presents another fine experiment in prose style from the author of The Book of Spirits and The Witchery. Reese wrote the book in a style closely imitative of Stoker's as it is supposedly from the author of Dracula himself. It is mostly presented as Stoker's journal, in fact. However, it appears that Reese is limited to one or two prose styles per novel, which limitation works to lessen his achievement in this connection.
Prose experiments are not new. The most important literary age for this may have come and gone in the 17th and 18th centuries with the epistelary novel (a novel written in letters between the characters, sometimes including journal or diary entries as well). In such a novel, each character had a necessarily individual style that helped to distinguish each character from another. I hold that The Dracula Dossier would have been a much richer book for including the diary entries and letters of other characters involved, such as Lady Wilde, the mother of Oscar Wilde, and Hall Caine, another victorian novelist well involved in the plot. Reese fails to take the opportunity to use these historic literary personages as writers in his novel, and so as readers we only get to read Reese's recreation of Stoker's prose. It left me wondering why James Reese would abandon such an opportunity. As great as The Dracula Dossier is, it would have been a much greater book if he had done as I've described. Most likely, his focus on Stoker is due to a fascination with the man himself, and so The Dracula Dossier is itself a tribute to Stoker, which is fine. I'm just saying this because I've read his past novels, and in each one Reese seems to focus on one character and one prose style, very well executed but still only one. He has done this before, and I am waiting for him to do more, to give us more, because I know he can.
Rather than being a story about Dracula, The Dossier is a a story about Jack the Ripper, and how the events of that story, as presenced by Stoker and co., may have inspired the classic Dracula. Reese cleverly connects the Jack the Ripper murders and the Dracula story, harvesting the sensationalism of both to create an engrossing and well-written thriller. I was not disappointed and neither will you be.
Summary of The Dracula Dossier: A Novel of Suspense
While taking an evening stroll through one of London's most impoverished districts, author Bram Stoker spies a maddeningly familiar figure hurrying through the shadows. Little does he know that, only a few steps away, a vicious killer has claimed his first victim, a local prostitute. The crime spree of the century has begun?and the hapless writer is the prime suspect. Now, to clear his name, Stoker must enlist the aid of illustrious friends?including Walt Whitman, the wildly popular novelist Sir Thomas Henry Hall Caine, and Lady Jane Wilde, mother of the most notorious literary notable of the day?to hunt down the fiend who is taunting and terrorizing London and calling himself Jack the Ripper.
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