"Lucas mimics Stoker's style so well that it's hard to distinguish his own writing from passages interpolated from
Dracula
. A fully humanized character study."
-
Publishers Weekly
Perhaps the most infamous supporting character in all of Gothic Horror is R.M. Renfield, the unstable patient under observation at Dr. Seward's Carfax Asylum in Bram Stoker's
-a pathetic wretch who prophesies the imminent arrival of "the Master" while covertly feeding on spiders and flies.
Yet Stoker's 1887 classic tells us almost nothing about him.
Why-and how-was such an unsavory figure chosen to be the Un-dead Count's groveling envoy?
In this remarkable harbinger of the "mash-up" novel, author Tim Lucas-with the help of Stoker himself-takes us on an illuminating, magical, sometimes strangely erotic investigation into Renfield's origin, fitted seamlessly within the language and the flurry of correspondence and other documentation found in
.
THE BOOK OF RENFIELD
reinvigorates Stoker's seminal horror masterpiece with numerous, uncanny stories within stories-alternately ghastly, marvelous, and hauntingly tender, framing DRACULA's robust blood-and-thunder with a flair for meta and modernity.
This Newly Revised Edition is extensively reworded and restructured, incorporating many paragraphs of content deleted from the original 2005 text. Also included is a contextualizing new Foreword by horror expert
Stephen R. Bissette
and a substantial Afterword by the author.