The Dracula Dossier by James Reese

[cw gortner]

I just reviewed this for Amazon Vine:

Bestselling author James Reese has captivated readers with his dark gothic tales of the hemaphrodite witch Herculine; now, in his fourth foray into the genre, he turns to the early life of author Bram Stoker before the publication of "Dracula", mining the controversies surrounding Jack the Ripper to present a chilling and painstakingly authentic recreation of Victorian England.

Overworked by his mercurial and overpowering boss, surrounded by some of the finest minds of his age, Stoker finds himself at loss in his life. While he enjoys his work as a theatre manager, his marriage is one of loveless convenience; he struggles inwardly with his own latent homosexuality; and his writing attempts have been less than stellar. The arrival of an enigmatic American doctor changes everything when one night during a walk in Whitechapel, Stoker spots the doctor in suspicious circumstances. Soon thereafter, a prostitute is found disemboweled, and with the discovery that a cherished knife of his has gone missing Stoker is plunged into a dangerous gambit to clear his name and reveal who the mysterious killer stalking Whitechapel is.

The endemic fear that Jack the Ripper created during his savage reign is expertly conveyed through Stoker's meticulous eye. Using the framing device of a dossier written by Stoker and anonymously submitted to an editor at William Morrow publishers, Mr Reese draws upon the Victorian tradition of journals and letters to tell his tale, cleverly foreshadowing the creation of Stoker's vampiric masterpiece. Such Victorian luminaries as the Wilde family and the poet Yeats make guest appearances; a generous use of footnotes offer tantalizing additional information.

While some readers may find Reese's employment of Victorian-era language and styling difficult to overcome at first, perseverance will yeild unexpected rewards as this novel gains its spell-binding momentum. Deliberately evoking the works of past masters, he depicts an era of claustrophobic terror and repression - one in which a murderer terrorized an entire city and an unknown writer finally found his voice.