Dracula is Dead and Well and Living in Chicago
3 stars
Matthew Maule, or Dracula as he prefers not to be called, is dead and well and residing at the top of a ninety-storey apartment building in Chicago. Despite this attempt at foreloading the novel with near-future referents and naming modern technology (such as late-model Apple Macs), there is something monochrome about this story. Cars to and fro in the sticky late summer afternoons and ceiling fans turn ineffectually; and something's gone missing from a neighbourhood museum. The Field Museum has, as it were, lost its charm. This wouldn't be of concern to Maule at the top of his tower, except that someone gets murdered in his apartment and it seems to be connected to the theft. Maule is no longer the bloodsucking fiend that history remembers; he is a cultured gentleman and one of the good guys.
What follows is an exercise in marrying Egyptian mythology with vampirism, and also …
Matthew Maule, or Dracula as he prefers not to be called, is dead and well and residing at the top of a ninety-storey apartment building in Chicago. Despite this attempt at foreloading the novel with near-future referents and naming modern technology (such as late-model Apple Macs), there is something monochrome about this story. Cars to and fro in the sticky late summer afternoons and ceiling fans turn ineffectually; and something's gone missing from a neighbourhood museum. The Field Museum has, as it were, lost its charm. This wouldn't be of concern to Maule at the top of his tower, except that someone gets murdered in his apartment and it seems to be connected to the theft. Maule is no longer the bloodsucking fiend that history remembers; he is a cultured gentleman and one of the good guys.
What follows is an exercise in marrying Egyptian mythology with vampirism, and also a chase narrative as Maule fights off ancient evil in the spirit world. There's a lot of handwaving about how vampires can change shape and transmute into a mist (as a quantum wave function, apparently), and it seems they can carry mobile phones and other small devices with them while they do so. In the end the science is no more than windowdressing in any vampire story, which can't explain in other than supernatural terms how any creature can be both living and not, unless it's Schroedinger's cat. All the handwaving in the world won't get over that one and it's best not to try.
This novel goes along, keeping the interest ticking over at a certain level, and the level of writing is usually quite good, but some pause must be suggested by a book whose back cover blurbs includes one by someone who's been dead for eight years: the author's former collaborator Roger Zelazny. Saberhagen has been writing these Dracula novels since 1975 - there are modern authors of SF and Fantasy who are no older than this series. Apparently the early books, which united Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, are a good deal better. There is a certain coldness in the story also.