MIDWINTERBLOOD
It’s really too bad about this book, a young adult novel with a complexity and ambition you don’t usually find in such fare, but which ultimately fails to reach its full potential.
THE LOST BOYS
Surprisingly, this novel isn’t all that bad–even if it contains the expected hasty prose and wobbly storytelling I’ve come to expect from movie novelizations–being quite slick and enjoyable overall.
LITTLE ORPHAN VAMPIRES
What this perilously slim 82-page trifle lacks is the poetic charge and dark eroticism of Rollin’s best films.
THE KENSEI
I normally go out of my way to avoid vampire series novels, which Jon F. Merz’s THE KENSEI is, but its premise was simply too wild to resist: a ninja vampire hunting organ traffickers in Japan!
KEN RUSSELL’S DRACULA
As an admitted Ken Russell fanatic I’d like very much to say this screenplay is an unqualified triumph, and to be sure, it does contain some impressive things.
INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (Book)
This iconic bestseller is perhaps the key vampire novel of our time.
HELOISE
Sometimes, to get to the really good stuff the horror fiction buff must look outside the horror shelves for mislabeled genre fiction. One example would be this “surreal fairy tale,” an impressive 100 page exercise in contained apprehension.
FRIGHT NIGHT
Skipp & Spector (who as of the early 1990s have gone their separate ways) were always at their best in unflinching and intense prose, which you won’t find here.
DRACULA by Bram Stoker
DRACULA may well be the most famous horror novel of all time. I’m almost chagrined to admit I’m never been entirely thrilled with it.
THE DELICATE DEPENDENCY
To be sure, a lot of crap was published during the horror boom of the 1980s, but some real gems also made their way to publication during that period, and were inexplicably lost in the shuffle. Examples of the latter include the early novels of Jack Ketchum, which have only recently gotten the attention they deserve, and Michael Talbot’s THE DELICATE DEPENDENCY, an unassumingly packaged paperback original that has yet to receive its full dues.