DRACULAS

I was checking out author Robert J. Duperre’s (THE FALL) blog and found a review of a little gem titled DRACULAS, which I quickly snatched up for a read.

The novel, authored by Jeff Strand, F. Paul Wilson, Jack Kilborn, Blake Crouch and J.A. Konrath, begins with a package delivered to the mansion of a billionaire dying of cancer. The package contains a bizarre skull–human, but with long teeth, like a shark’s, that was dug up in a farmer’s field in the Romanian countryside. He presses the skull’s fangs against his neck and is rushed to a nearby hospital, where he dies … and becomes transformed.

And anybody he bites becomes almost immediately transformed. What follows is a long night of hell in this rural hospital.

The authors each took a unique character and wrote that person’s story, with the whole edited together in a single cohesive 80,000-word novel. At first, my expectations got the better of me, and I soon found myself wishing John Skipp had authored it. But when all hell breaks loose it very quickly finds its groove, and the result is very satisfying splatterpunk involving fun characters I cared about and wanted to survive. Tons of fun, and the pages flew by as the blood endlessly splattered. Recommended.

Note this Kindle book also contains a bonus 80,000 words, including author interviews, two alternate endings, deleted scenes, short stories, excerpts from other works by the same authors, and more. Particularly interesting is a collection of emails providing a behind the scenes look at the collaboration that occurred between the authors.