“Excellent.”—Library Journal A slave of Dracula emerges from the shadows in a terrifying reinvention of Bram Stoker’s classic novel. Renfield, confined to an asylum, obsesses in his diary, pens letters of insane passion to his wife, and still answers his Master’s calling. Ordered to hunt and kill Van Helsing, Renfield complies, setting the stage for the ultimate battle between good and evil, the living and the dead. It will take him from the dark crypts of Dracula’s castle to the more personal darkness of his own descent into madness, and the shocking truth of where it all began. “Hambly creates a past for this possessed man via his diaries and letters to his wife. . . . [she] superbly weaves Stoker’s plot and style with her own, producing one of the best recent vampire yarns.”—Booklist

"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 Dracula—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 Dracula. 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.

Shrouded in secrecy, the military conducted de-conditioning experiments on soldiers during the 1970â€TMs. Harvard psychologist Isaac Renfield was hired to “re-condition†these individuals who had mysteriously lost all social conditioning. After a few short months of this work, Renfield mysteriously vanished from the military base. All references to his research are lost.#xD;In 2006, zombie researcher Melissa Ebbe stumbled across a mention of Renfield on the internet, and set out on a quest to find out about this mysterious project and the psychologist who had vanished 30 years earlier. Renfield and Me documents her encounter with this reclusive man and his chilling experience “creating the perfect soldier.â€

Before acclaimed playwright and filmmaker Neil LaBute became the creator and showrunner of Syfy’s hit series Van Helsing, he had already adapted Dracula for the stage—with a fierce female Van Helsing as the vampire hunter. In this masterful adaptation, Neil LaBute brings a rich theatricality and his provocative way with language and story to the world of Count Dracula, Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and his beloved Mina—this time, with very much a mind of her own—infusing the classic gothic tale of terror, obsession, and pathos with a modern edge. Chilling yet stylish in its atmosphere, dark yet deeply human in its emotional impact, Neil LaBute’s Dracula: A Thriller in 2 Acts is a tribute to both LaBute’s dramatic vision and the timelessness of Stoker’s novel.

Famous for being deathly serious, the vampire genre has a consistent yet often critically overlooked subgenre--the comedic spoof and satire. This is the first book dedicated entirely to documenting and analyzing the vampire comedy on film and television. Various types of comedy are discussed, outlining the important differences between spoofing, serious-spoofing, parody and satire. Seminal films such as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Love at First Bite, Vampire in Brooklyn, Dracula: Dead and Loving It and What We Do In the Shadows are featured. More importantly, this book demonstrates how comedy is central to both the common perception of the vampire and the genre's ever-evolving character, making it an essential read for those interested in the laughing undead and creatures that guffaw in the night.