📖 Book Review ~ Mr Stoker and the Vampires of the Museum by Matthew Gibson

 

Book Guild
2023

Thanks to Cameron Marketing and Publicity for my copy of the book

London, September 1888. Jack the Ripper roams the streets. A scream rings out from beneath the stage of the Lyceum Theatre…

A young ‘actress’ has been attacked, suffering peculiar bite wounds to her neck; an event that announces a series of strange, vampiric happenings, and thrusts an unwitting Bram Stoker – acting manager of the Lyceum and aspiring author – into the limelight, and the action.

Increasingly perplexed by the unsettling behaviour of his 'Guv’nor’, the brilliant but mercurial actor, Henry Irving, and Irving’s acclaimed leading lady, Ellen Terry, Stoker soon starts suspecting the worst. And then, another attack reveals a vicious Prussian baron, returned to London as a vampire seeking revenge...

📖 My Review..

There's nothing more gothic than the myths and legends which surround Jack the Ripper and Vampires and the author combines both in this imaginative story of Mr Stoker and the Vampires of the Lyceum. When a young actress is found in mysterious circumstances and with bite marks on her neck it heralds the start of some unusual happenings at the Lyceum Theatre, in London, where Bram Stoker is the acting manager.

Moving between locations and with a skilful eye for details Mr Stoker and the Vampires of the Lyceum is an interesting character driven novel which brings to life the theatrical aspects of the story along with a deepening mystery which surrounds Jack the Ripper and the gothic nature of the Victorian era's  fascination for all things macabre.

Mr Stoker and the Vampires of the Lyceum is an intricately written and atmospheric story and whilst it is undoubtedly fiction, the author has used his considerable knowledge of Bram Stoker to bring this fascinating era to life along with the intrigue of a complex historical mystery in an entertaining story filled with intrigue and danger.

About the Author

Matthew Gibson is one of the world's leading scholars on Bram Stoker- the author of Dracula- and the Gothic. Born and educated in the UK, he is now Professor of English Literature at the University of Macau. Prior to this he worked in a number of universities in the UK, including the Universities of Surrey and Hull, as well as the university of Lódź in Poland and the American University in Bulgaria, Matthew is a former visiting fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. Currently responsible for curating and annotating material on Stoker for cutting-edge online research resource, Oxford Bibliographies, Matthew is the author of Dracula and the Eastern Question, co-editor of Bram Stoker and the Late Victorian World, and a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Dracula. Mr Stoker is his first work of fiction. 

Twitter @mattgibsonyeats

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