If I wasn’t so busy with real life right now, I would have totally signed up for Carl V.‘s R.I.P. Challenge. Unfortunately, I had to refrain for the time being. Alas. But as a lot of bloggers seemed to be reading about vampires lately, I decided I wanted another vampire book (because I haven’t read enough of those lately anyway, pfft).
Van Helsing is one of the characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This journal starts a couple of months before the story of Dracula, and ends a couple of months afterwards. At first, Van Helsing really doesn’t believe in vampires, but when he’s visiting a friend and watches him be attacked and killed by a vampire, he has no choice to believe in them. At this point, Van Helsing takes on the mission to prevent the spread of vampirism. (Erm, perhaps “mission” wasn’t the correct word to use as I now have the Mission Impossible theme stuck in my head.)
I thought some of the best parts of this book were the foreword, footnotes and afterward. It amused me to no end that the author was trying to convince me that Van Helsing wasn’t a fictional character, but was a real person. Kupfer makes it sound like his contemporaries have been mocking and ridiculing him because of the fact that a journal he found in an attic belonged to a real Van Helsing that really hunted vampires.
Overall, the book was alright. Nothing super special, but a good light read. The vampires here were much eviler than most of the other vampires I’ve been reading about lately, which was such a nice change. Lisa mentioned in her blog not too long ago about how vampires are usually no longer considered to be the monsters they really are, but things in modern culture focus more on how they are romantic and sexy… Well, I had high hopes that this book wouldn’t focus on the sensual aspect of the vampire, but more on the scary parts, and for the most part I wasn’t disappointed.
Sounds interesting. Being a huge fan of Stoker’s Dracula I tend to shy away from books based on his characters.
Carl V.
September 17th, 2006 at 11:08 am
The book was a good and very good read, but the author claims he actually found the journal in his grandmother’s house after she died. He claims the journal is real and every word of it true, but the copywright page clearly states that it is a work of fiction. That is o.k., but it is contrarian to his claims of the journal being real.
Janice
Janice
November 1st, 2006 at 12:10 am
Maybe I’m a little too apt to believe such things, but living in this small town with lots of weird people i believe that I may have seen one one time or another, but i simply cannot condone this book as purly fiction, perhaps courtney and janice it is because you suggested it as too much fiction. i cannot stand having people tell me that i am wrong about something that is hard to prove
Kathleen
January 7th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Kathleen – I never said that the supernatural stuff (vampires, or fey, or whatever) didn’t exist or weren’t real. I’m just saying that this book was about a fictional character (not even the vampire itself, but a specific vampire hunter) that another author created, and that this author was claiming was real. And it didn’t turn me off the book, I enjoyed it; I thought it was amusing and made the book enjoyable for me.
I did not mean for it to come across that I thought people who believed in vampires were wrong, and for that I apologize.
Courtney
January 7th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
Well the way you were talking made it sound like you didnt believe that Allen C. Kupfer actually found this book. I like believing that what I know of a person is what is they’re like. I also need to believe that this is non-fiction until after my English project is over, but in all it sounded to me as I read it that it sounded rude. But i’m an author sometimes things come across me other than what they were meant depending on the wording and such. So i always keep a thesauras handy. but yet i still cannot remember how to spell it correctly.
Kathleen
January 9th, 2007 at 9:21 pm