1982 fantasy, fifth in Saberhagen's loose Dracula series. A stage
magician is asked to perform at a rebuilt castle in Illinois, and
everyone's plans are interlocking.
This one definitely moves the series from horror to fantasy:
gruesome fantasy, yes, but there's explicit magic here, not to mention
time travel to Arthur's Britain. There's also a plethora of
characters; one might have cared about some of them, but by the end
the ones who aren't supoerpowered are mostly casually killed or
mind-wiped, ha ha fooled you.
The plot is an intriguing one, but the characters are minimal (and
even when two of them know a thing they don't talk about it with each
other). Women are either near-sexless or monsters who use sex to
manipulate men. Incest and rape are framed as being more shocking than
murder even when they're done for the same end goals (raising magical
power). There are lots of viewpoints (remember Joe the cop from
Chicago?) but most of them don't get to do much beyond providing a
convenient narrative camera-mount. And sometimes it's quite hard not
to burst out laughing.
The dim dungeon […] crawled with powers, his own, […],
who-knew-whose. All these were edging each other ominously,
maneuvering for position, elbowing like basketball players under
some evil backboard.
Oh yeah, and Dracula's in it too, mostly as a deus ex machina.
There's a lot to be enjoyed in this book, mostly in the high-level
plotting, but there's even more padding to get through to find it.
- Posted by David Pulver at
05:24am on
20 June 2024
I remember being quite surprised by this novel since in an unusual bit of restraint the US first edition did not mention Dracula in the blurb or cover. So it actually came as an interesting WTF? to encounter the vampire as a cameo. It had been several years since the last Saberhagan drac novel, so I'd thought it was an unrelated Arthurian-Occult work.
(Yes, there was a brooding sinister fellow on the cover who was likely Drac, but I didn't make the connection...)
- Posted by David Pulver at
05:34am on
20 June 2024
I remember buying it based off the front page blurb that said "in the tradition of Mary Stewart and Steven King" which wasn't a pairing you see every day.
(I probably figured out it was a Dracula novel within a few minutes of getting past the prologue, as some of the cast from Old Friend of the Family had starring roles.)
I agree the book did seem padded. I enjoyed the preceding novels enough to re-read them each at some point, but I don't think I've re-read Dominion since I purchased it.
- Posted by RogerBW at
10:12am on
20 June 2024
I don't know much much influence even someone as commercially successful as Saberhagen would have had over his book jackets, though I suspect not much. In several of the books I've noticed that Dracula isn't mentioned explicitly for a while.
For examples of more vampire-centred books, I was thinking of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire as a later book, because I read the first three books in about 1989-1990 when they were being widely talked about in the UK; but apparently it first came out in 1976, so it's possible Saberhagen was aware of it. To be fair I think this whole series is about vampires who know what they want and set out to get it, like any good protagonist, not vampires who drown themselves in self-pity.
Nancy A. Collins' Sunglasses After Dark wouldn't come out until 1989, and perhaps that kicked off the revival of interest. (And of course the Vampire RPG in 1991.)