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Various thoughts while reading the book (there may be spoilers):

• A few dozen pages in, this book is about 50% pretty good, 20% really good, and 30% cute.
• Neat vampire concept. According to his podcast, Super Scare Haunted Homeschool, he spent a ridiculous amount of time studying vampire lore history, and it shows. He took a very unique approach to the vampire, while at the same time, keeping it very obviously a recognizable vampire.
• Overtly sexual without being sexy. The transfer of fluids in a very specific bodily location increases the rape-yness that vampirism already exemplifies.
• About 2/3 of the way through, the book is 60% pretty good, 30% really good, and still 10% cute.
• All the husbands in this book suck. Not a single one is a redeemable character.
• Time jump! Finding it hard to believe in the 3-year gap, maybe it will pay off in some way.
• COCKROACH IN THE EAR BURN IT WITH FIRE
• Oof, turning the kids’ situations into what could easily be viewed nowadays as “grooming” makes it even creepier.
• There is no way Grace would have come through in the end, based on how she acted the rest of the time. Probably the only part of the book where I had a legit problem w/ where Hendrix took the plot.
• 3-year gap not really paid off, would have probably made more sense with one year.
• Book’s over. I go back to the original statement – 50% pretty good, 20% really good, 30% cute.

Not bad over all. I would give it it 6-out-of-10 Cockroaches wriggling their way into your ear. You’re welcome for the image.

Just a list of thoughts I had as I thought them:

• Very enjoyable, fast read.
• A little bit too much of all the characters basically falling in love with each other on first meeting and becoming best friends. A lot of “oh won’t you be my best friend for life now since we’ve been through this together?”
• Characters are a little dumb in places where they really shouldn’t be. They literally just got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a bat, and then Quincy sees the bats sitting outside the windows staring at them and they don’t think anything more of it when it flies away.
• Same with how they got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a mist and a control the fog, and Mina goes up to her room and sees the fog coming at her and sees them mist in her room, and everybody sees her getting paler and paler, and they don’t think anything of it.
• Surprisingly scary in places, and even more surprisingly gorey. Not what I expected from a book of the time period.
• On a similar note, a lot more baby-eating and baby-murder than I was expecting.
• Re: Lucy – not everyone has the same blood type. I’m surprised this didn’t come up as a possibility to either Van Helsing or Dr. Steward when Lucy continued failing in health after all the men gave her blood.
• The ending was a let down after how good the rest of the book was. Build for 200+ pages to this epic climax, to then have it all wrapped up over the course of 2 or 3 pages.
• There is a potential Coens Brothers-esque film here in which no vampire exists. Just a nice old count who desperately wants to escape the overly supersticious and paranoid people of rural run-down Romania to move to modern, upbeat London, but is harrassed and eventually murdered by a psychotic professor and a schizophrenic realtor and their cohorts. Do it Hollywood!

Highly recommended; 4 out of 5 vampire bats for general audiences.

Full confession – I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Stephen King. He is an odd author to me. While I don’t love every one of his books (and in fact, dislike many of them), he is one of those authors that I read everything he puts out. If it’s got his name on it, I usually read it eventually, even if I’m almost 50 years late to the party. Not sure where this comes from, or why I’m so rigorous in my dedication to his books, but for whatever reason, it is the case.

It was not always, however. From the early 2000’s (coincidentally around the time I read Dreamcatcher …. or, maybe not-so-coincidentally), until around 2012, I never read a new Stephen King book. Dreamcatcher was just that bad, and I finally gave up on him after reading all his novels through the 80’s and 90’s. Sometime around 2012 though, I picked up Duma Key, and blasted through it. It scratched an itch I didn’t even know I had, and ever since then, I’ve been reading all of King’s work as it comes out.

The book is not straight horror, even when compared to King’s more psychological horror. It’s a bit of a drama, and a bit of an introspection on growing old and becoming disabled, and it’s a bit of an “On Writing,” but for art – specifically painting. However, there are still plenty of spooks, and a few scenes that are enough nightmare fuel to keep King’s legacy rolling.

The genre of the book, I describe as “non-Lovecraftian weird horror.” Much of the horror comes from near-imaginings of things happening, with a touch of very gruesome actual supernatural mischief, but it takes a very long time to truly get into the ghostly happenings. The first half of the book is more about the protagonist – Edgar Freemantle – dealing with a crippling accident that left him maimed and somewhat brain-damaged. As he re-learns to use his body and mind, he begins painting (at his therapist’s recommendation), and then the ghosts come into play.

The supernatural horror aspects of this book are tied to the secrets in a secondary character’s past, and when everything begins coming together like puzzle pieces around two-thirds of the way through the book, the real horrors begin. The reason I called it “weird” above is because, while it’s non-Lovecraftian (so it’s not about unknowable, unnameable evils beyond the realms of time and space and mortal comprehension), it is very inhuman. The ghosts/spirits/supernatural boogey(wo)men are not truly based around the dead coming back to life, or vampires, or other human-ish goals and ambitions. If anything, the horrors seem to come from an extremely mythological place, a place of ancient gods (or at least super/meta-human-level beings) and magic.

The book is also extraordinarily sad. Or rather, bittersweet. Since it’s a Stephen King book that’s not Revival, we know that good will eventually overcome evil, but moreso than almost any of his books other than It, he leaves you with a feeling of “Yeah, we won, but at what cost?” Some truly terrible things happen in the book, and for much less reason than is fair, and often feel like physical punches to your gut.

I love this book. It’s the best King book in the second half of his career, and is in my top-5 all-time favorite Kings. Read it, and be prepared to feel it.