Back
Bram Stoker: Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (EBook, 2008, Penguin Group UK) 1 star

Truly bad

1 star

This volume is really two books in one. The first collects various of Stoker's short stories, beginning with "Dracula's Guest", and could reasonably be described as "Late Victorian Gothic meh". Not bad, per se, but they're just sort of... there. The remainder of the volume is Stoker's last novella "Lair Of The White Worm", and here's where things really go off the rails. Now, I saw the film years ago and vaguely remember it being terrible, but being Ken Russell, it was terrible in an entertaining way. This is very much not. If you can get past the eye-watering racism (and it's really, really bad) and the sexism, what you're left with is a story that's absolutely all over the place, a meandering plot, opaque character motivations, and unbelievable dialogue. There's literally nothing to recommend this unless you're on some sort of Stoker completism kick.