I highly recommend writer and fellow genre expert Allen Kupfer's very entertaining and original spin on the Dracula legend, The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing. An addictively spooky and atmospheric novel written in ‘diary’ style, the plot entails the author Kupfer unearthing an old journal in his grandmother’s attic which turns out to have belonged to the legendary vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing (who was a close friend of Kupfer’s grandfather). The diary traces Van Helsing’s journey to Hungary where at the residence of vampire specialist Dr.Borescu, he first encounters the beautiful, hypnotically seductive female vampire Malia and witnesses the devastation the plague of the undead is causing across Eastern Europe. Van Helsing flees home to Amsterdam by the skin of his teeth, but soon discovers that nothing will stop Malia from capturing her prey upon realising his beloved wife has been infected. Realising that he may never escape the vampires, Van Helsing delves into research to try and find a way to stop their evil reign and discovers the possibility that it was in fact Malia who transformed Vlad the Impaler into a vampire, and that Malia and her ilk originated from the Middle East centuries ago. Thus continues Van Helsing’s grisly quest as he ventures to the exotic locales of Transylvania and Mosul where the ghastly creatures continue to wreak bloody, brutal mayhem...
Fluid and action-packed, the ‘journal’ format doesn’t distract from the reading experience at all and really enhances it, particularly with the addition of footnotes, annotations and eerie pencil ‘sketches’. An excellent addition to the vampire literature genre and a must-read for all vampire and horror fans.
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