After reading your reviews I really was curious. I mean, there are so many boring and bad books out there, nice covers which promise so much and deliver nothing - how bad could this be to deserve that much scorn?
Imagine my surprise when I discovered the novel on Ebay a couple of weeks ago. A german edition.
I knew that Aubin´s Terror was published as a heftroman - I own it in fact -, but Dracula? There was no other bidder, which wasn´t very surprising, and I got it. It was published by some publisher I never heard of and which I guess published three books before it went belly up.
Then I read it yesterday.
Oh my god!
I have read fan fiction which was more coherent.
Can somebody explain to me what is supposed to happen there?
As far as I gathered from this prose trainwreck there is this bloke who witnesses the slaying of a local vampire girl. It is the 70s, so it can only be Dracula himself. Yeah, sure. Who else? Count von Carnstein wasn´t in the vicinity.
After drinking a lot of whiskey, feeding his fucking cat and filling pages with boring nonsense he calls his friends, which happen to be rich, demented and warlocks. Who hunt Dracula. Why, what, why, huh? Even the Shadow wouldn´t know it. The writer didn´t either because he don´t tell.
Idiot friend #1 knows out of thin air that Dracula can only hides in a tourist spot like Avonbury, because ... well, he explains it for some pages but I didn´t understood it. Gather I wasn´t bright enough. Or it was a lot of incoherent nonsense.
They park somewhere and see some man, which might be Dracula or not, doing god knows what, then they drive back home. At home idiot friend #2 is burning some chest which had possessed the narrator? WTF? He was possessed? How, why, huh?
Doesn´t matter anyway, because enter the scarlet woman, which appropiatly is called Eva. As the hero is called Adam. What wit! Eva is a medium and hot. She falls all over the hero, but he doesn´t want her. This is explained a few chapter long, but frankly at this point I was skipping the pages because this dreck became torture. Eva talks a lot of gibberish, struts about in too tight lingerie - not even this could uplift the novel which is saying a lot - and they hunt Dracula or whatever.
At the end she suddenly is one of the undead and gets naked on a stone age altarr, while moronic hero does nothing, and then idiot friend #1 and idiot friend #2 destroys Dracula and Eva from the distance with some magic. This is of course just a guess as it is written so bad that it is hard to understand. And then. thank god, the novel is at its end.
How could this piece of nonsense a) could get written and b) could get sold and c) could get published and d) could get sold to Germany and translated?
I have a theory.
The writer cobbled some unsold bits together, because he needed desperately some money for whiskey, fags and cat-food. The editor at NEL - it couldn´t be Laurence James, I don´t want to believe this, I truly don´t - now was fired on the same day he got this He thought
and put this on the fast track to production, so he could have a good laugh.
The german editor, well, he was just a idiot. Or he was bribed by the agent. Or both.
This is truly the worst of the worst. Badly written dóesn´t even cut is. Unbelievable.