RogerBW's Blog

2002 horror, tenth and last in Saberhagen's loose Dracula series. Dickon, a cowardly ancient vampire, brings a friend to visit Dracula (still living in Chicago as "Matthew Maule"); in the morning, the friend is dead and Dickon has vanished. But what does this all have to do with alchemy and ancient Egypt?

This story happens almost entirely in the modern day, with only very slight historical flashbacks. But mostly it's an exercise in juggling many characters and factions, starting with Dracula and his allies (descendants of Mina Harker), and particularly Andy, the son of Joe Keogh and Kate Southerland whom we first met in 1979's An Old Friend of the Family. (And to give this series credit, its chronology has kept pace with the real world; indeed, Dracula here briefly contemplates his continuing efforts to keep up with a society that's changing round him.)

Then there's a being claiming, with some plausibility, to be Sobek the crocofile god, and a group of less-civilised vampires than Dracula, and Dickon is still out there somewhere… all right, there's also the recurring theme of bringing in new people to the secret that there really are vampires, but a demonstration in person works rather better than the videotape of the previous book.

As for the plot, it's basically "The Six Napoleons": the MacGuffin was hidden in one of a set of identical statues thousands of years ago, and for unclear reasons everyone's started looking for them at once. There are some interesting twists, where a lesser author would have had six acts tracking down one statue at a time; indeed, this is at the core much more a story of characters, how someone reacts to learning that his beloved "uncle" is a blood-drinking monster, of how humans and vampires cooperate to make the most of their various skills and resources, than it is of tracking down items or having big fights. The solutiono to the whole business is daring, but very much in keeping with what has gone before.

This is not a definitive end to the series, though Saberhagen died before writing another. It's also to my mind not a high point, though it does a decent job; if you've enjoyed the previous nine, you might as well keep going, but if you haven't got on with the others you probably won't find anything more to your taste here.