The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Professor Abraham Van Helsing was the fictional creation of Bram Stoker for his dark work of fantasy Dracula …or was he?
Fragments of a recently discovered journal suggest otherwise.
For the first time, in his own words, the legendary vampire hunter tells his own story
- his background and early years
- his research in Rumania and the Mideast
- his medical work
…and most importantly his discovery of perhaps the greatest threat to man's dominion on earth, vampires.
Filled with data to inform, and tips to educate, the journal is more than a study of vampirism. It is also the story of a man's obsession with eradicating the world of its greatest scourge, a dark evil that claimed his wife in its thrall.
Working with the textural fragments he inherited from his grandfather, Professor Allen Conrad Kupfer, has managed to piece together the story behind the story that did not begin and end with Bram Stoker's Dracula.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spoof, send-up or wannabe spook tale, this addition to the "vampire culture" that Kupfer claims is all too real today attempts to go for the throat but misses any vital artery. This slim novel purportedly contains an 1886 diary by the famous vampire hunter Van Helsing of Dracula fame, annotated by Kupfer's long-lost grandpa and unearthed in Kupfer's grandmother's attic. Clearly smitten by Keats's "Lamia" and "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" (Swinburne's overheated Lady of Pain), as well as by Lord Byron's darker proclivities, Kupfer struggles to give Van Helsing's jumpy journal entries a credible 19th-century flavor, though occasional flare-ups of Americanisms dilute the Transylvanian atmospherics. Kupfer's narrative professorial persona also updates his various subnarrators' tales with pseudo-scholarly footnotes that include an evidently irresistible whack or two at stingy academic administrators. Van Helsing's diary includes entries both before and after his London adventure that resulted in the gory destruction of Dracula, recounted far more satisfactorily by Bram Stoker. Embellished with befanged drawings signed "V.H.," Kupfer's little tale has all the depth of a comic book without any of its whiz-bang pop art fascination. (Apr. 27)
