Member Reviews

I've read various classic mashups (i.e. Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, Little Vampire Women, etc.) and each has their own flair to our beloved classics. This one, though, combines both Dracula and Frankenstein while gender swapping the characters. Lady Dracula is seeking out Mina in order to resurrect her sister Elizabeth through the reanimation of corpses.

I will not spoil all the details, but this mashup stands on its own among the rest of it's horror mashup brothers and sisters. I was skeptical at first, despite the description since it is Dracula and Frankenstein after all. Combining these two is quite a stretch but Rafael pulled it off quite well.

Definitely would recommend this if you are a fan of literary classic mashups.

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Fracula? Dracenstein? An interesting concept! This whole book shouldn't have worked, and yet somehow it did. At times I felt the styles conflicted, but it actually helped to highlight what was original and what was taken from the texts themselves, making it a really unique work of fiction. It wasn't perfect, but it was definitely a new concept and deserves points just for that!

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I really liked how this novel managed to blend some of the most famous horror novels and still managed to find a new and fresh angle to explore.

I really enjoyed reading the original Dracula (I enjoyed Frankenstein far less) and loved the author's fresh take on the characters, especially its re-writing of Mina.

The monsters were interesting, I liked the conflict between Eva and her creator, and would have loved to see more.

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I wanted to give this book a full five (5) stars, but the more I think about it I realize I can not do that. The book was good, but just like the original Dracula & Frankenstein it was so hard to read. Rafael Chandler kept the style of writing that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Bram Stoker did in their books and just like those books it was very hard to read. The story line and plots were very well written, but the style of writing is not to my taste. So in such it made it very hard for me to stay enthralled with reading the book.

If you liked the original books, then you will probably enjoy this book. As for me, I was not a fan of the story. Please, don't take this as a review that will put you off reading this book. All books are meant and should be read. I just did not enjoy this book.

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I've never been interested in reading about Dracula and Frankenstein, and this book here gave me more and more that makes me wanna keep reading it. it's quite cool.

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So I finally read Frankenstein for the first time last year and I thought it was okay. Dracula I read ...sometime in high school and it was honestly until a few years ago the longest most absolutely boring book I had ever read. I love vampires but I haaate the original Dracula book. Actually I ended up giving this book more stars than I gave to either of the originals, but I also had a lot more fun reading it.

This book is a kind of mash-up of Frankenstein and Dracula with most of the main characters gender-swapped. Jonathan is nowhere to be found and instead Mina is the solicitor that goes to meet Dracula, who is also a woman. "Frankenstein's" monster is also a woman [named Eve] and was made by Dracula instead, which is just such a great idea I can't believe no one has come up with it before. It also features several other characters from both of the novels - Seward, Renfield, Justine, that ship captain dude, Van Helsing, etc and all of these characters are still men.

It was a really fun read because - in my opinion - the author managed to take all the most interesting and relevant parts from both novels and edit them together into something new. There are a lot of passages that I recognized as being lifted straight from the source material, but there is also a lot of new stuff as well so you definitely won't be bored. Sometimes the styles don't match up perfectly - these books were published almost 80 years apart, that would be like mashing up something this year with something written in 1938 - but overall it's a really fun story and I'd definitely recommend it for classic horror fans or fans of retellings.

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Well, finally I’ve tired one of these genre mash up stories. I must admit to be somewhat skeptical of the concept, taking two classic works of fiction and squishing them together in an attempt to produce something new. Or newish technically. Or just different. But then again popular entertainment never met an idea they didn’t wish to bastardize, sequelize, remake, revisit or just mess with, so here we are. And reading this one was also sort of inspired by the somewhat disappointing new Frankenstein tv show on Netflix. Turns out this book was much easier to get into than the show. The author squished Dracula and Frankenstein together with a distinctly feminist angle, so that all the main protagonists are female. Mina, the intrepid slayer, Countess Dracula and Eve, the creature. Countess Dracula is obsessed with bringing back to life her dear dead sister Elizabeth, so she turns to modern science of reanimating corpses by the means of galvanism and electricity. Dracula is still a vampire too, she’s just a regular Jill of all Trades, a versatile monstress. So you know the stories, you know just how they’ll play out, but it’s still pretty fun. And what a pleasant surprise this book turned out to be. The language was modernized just enough so that the story wasn’t dragged down by the antiquated narration, although the book does maintain a good amount of it for authenticity. The writing was uniformly good, no idea how creating these sorts of stories works exactly, obviously a good amount of the text was borrowed and the rest heavily inspired, but some work must have gone into remixing it all. Still not sure if I’m sold on the value of mash ups, but if it gets readers excited about classics, that’s something. Maybe it isn’t meant to have an inherent value, maybe it’s just pure entertainment. Either way I liked it, it was a very enjoyable spin on the old prototypes, not sure how one might discuss originality with these sorts of things, but it is a different perspective with a gender switch up. Enjoyable quick read. Thanks Netgalley.

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