Okay listen I am VERY biased on this one. I don’t expect this to be five stars for everyone. But for me, a person who is in the throes of weaponized autism towards Dracula and Renfield and their bond, this was almost exactly what I wanted from this story. I am going to write a dissertation here okay.

Renfield got the short end of the stick in the original text. He’s Dracula’s foil, meant to show you the truth of vampirism and what it does to people. The ugliness of the disease that gets hidden behind aristocracy with Dracula. Renfield in the original text is a raving madman but also incredibly articulate, intelligent, and religious. This book takes those traits and explains why he is this way. It paints his entire life as Dracula’s masterpiece, and it gave me CHILLS in how it happened.

Even knowing exactly how this story ends does not prepare you for how we get there. Even knowing what Dracula is meant to be in the original text does not take away the shock of it being in your face. And even knowing what a pathetic figure Renfield is in the end does not prepare you for the complex morality of his mind, the trials he has to face in order to be lead to be the minion of Dracula.

This book…. Was heartbreaking. I stopped every five pages or so to WAIL at my husband about how badly I felt for this man. It is MISERY. THIS IS A BAD TIME. It is full of trauma, and abuse, and animal death, and hopeless yearning, and mother wound, and a silent god, and abandonment to evil. He is a poor child who identifies more with the animals around him than the humans, and his connection to animals is so utterly heartbreaking, given how we meet him in the original texts. He is such a precious boy I wish I could protect him.

The feel of this gets summed up so well in these words to Renfield promising him immortality:

“[…]one day, when your life is in tatters… when you discover the true meaning of horror, so terrible in its truth that you cannot even admit it to yourself… subject yourself to one more burden of unimaginable horror—and you shall be freed of your human prison.”

Renfield is a prisoner of his own narrative, of his own wounds, he is a victim of grooming and bad circumstance and in the end he seeks redemption because he realizes that he has been holding onto pain he didn’t need to, that even he could be forgiven.

At the same time we spend time in Dr Seward’s mind. Now, I didn’t have many feelings about him in the original text except to think he belonged in his own asylum cause he was a little off himself. He’s endearing and cocky and honestly reckless. But in this text he becomes a fully fleshed out character and a beautiful exploration of grief, as this is written as he is still coping with his own feelings about Lucy. He guides us through the events of the book by adding additional background which I actually found very interesting, and he fleshed out the other men as well. He is grappling with addiction, with grief, and with an obsession over Renfield and his ramblings. He is constantly one step from the supernatural but doesn’t quite have the words or belief for it.

Grief is handled so beautifully here both in the wound left by those we love and by those who harmed us. Seward says :

“I had helped bring an end to Count Dracula, true—but I had not begun to extirpate the Count Dracula in me.”

Renfield, as a child: “‘But, Father… If I put it down, the story of his life will be over.’ ‘It is over, child. Put it down.’”

And even Lucy, to Seward: “‘Lost in other people’s worlds,’ she echoed playfully, like the spoiled child she always was. ‘And what happens to yours in the meantime?’”

There are COUNTLESS passages I could copy and paste that are so incredibly powerful and moving especially when put next to each other. The picture he paints is so intricate and every character is woven in each other’s existence, they can not exist without one another. Renfield and Dracula’s bond is simultaneously beautiful and destructive, healing and harmful. My heart ACHED over it.

I think the author captured the narrative voice of both characters and the epistolary nature of the original text well, and near the end included large passages of the original text so that he was giving more context - these were after all the lost versions of the original recordings and journals of Seward. I thought he did this very well. It’s a great way of revisiting the material in a fresh way without reinventing a perfectly good wheel. He filled in gaps with why Renfield acted certain ways, had certain gifts, felt certain ways suddenly, why he was there in the first place and how he got there. The… feeling of inevitability was so utterly crushing at times I had to stop and take breaks because I was SO SAD.

I could keep writing for like twenty paragraphs but! Like I said! Listen this will not be for everyone. But if you’re like me and you wanted more from Renfield and Seward, this was a beautiful book. Like, hauntingly beautiful to me. If you have a mother wound, this will punch you in the gut repeatedly. Tim Lucas, I’m sorry that publishers and audience did not appreciate this when it came out and that is was such a struggle for it to get out there and even now is criminally underrated but you have found your number one fan of this book, I am buying it physically so that I can annotate it because I had 78 passages highlighted from this by the end. Whoever decided to put up that stupid newer cover on Amazon needs to be spoken to because it makes it look like AI slop from last year instead of the beautiful cover it originally had that represented the labor of love this was. If I do anything in this world it is to get other people to read this book and appreciate it even an IOTA as much as I did.

Renfield’s story deserves to be told, and you did it in a beautiful way that really humanized him. Before Renfield was a lunatic in an asylum, he was a scared little boy. After the events of the story, Seward was a man who lost two of the only people he felt connected to in his life. And after I finished this book I felt an immense loss at it being over. I already want to reread it despite the sheer sadness I experienced during it. So, thank you for fighting to publish the story you believed in. You have no idea how much you’re inspiring me to write as well.