1979 horror, third in Saberhagen's loose Dracula series. Kate
Southerland is murdered by a vampire, and her brother is kidnapped and
mutilated… but her family has a favour to call in.
There's not much substance to this book; as with the others I've
read in the series, I suspect the virtue was in the ideas more than in
any intricacies of plot. Vlad Tepes left a way that he could be
summoned, in dire emergency; the last of the true believers summons
him; it turns out that the family isn't even the bad guys' target, but
instead they were only using the attacks to lure him in. Lots of
vampire fights happen, and mere humans can't hope to get anywhere
against them. The good guys win.
And this is all fine, but I couldn't help expecting something more. I
mean, how did vampire X recruit vampire Y, who's a serial killer from
several decades ago? What have they been doing in the meantime? Why
has one of them bothered to acquire a perfume company? Is she
auditioning to be a Batman villain if the vampire gig doesn't work
out? Why go to all the effort of killing Vlad and ruling the world
when they can already have pretty much everything they want if they go
to a slight effort not to get caught?
Obviously there are possible answers to these questions, but
Saberhagen never bothers to give them. Ooh, native earth baked into a
piece of pottery as a more practical way of getting some rest, neat.
Oh no, the bad guy has ambushed Vlad and nearly killed him, how will
he survive? (Why didn't the bad guy finish him off?) Fair enough,
perhaps I'm not asking the same questions that the reader in 1979 was
expected to ask, but while bits of this were great fun I also found it
thoroughly frustrating. Maybe it's that I'm more an SF and fantasy
fan, interested in exploring the what-ifs, than I am a horror fan
wanting to be frightened.