The Hunger and Ecstasy of Vampires: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: The Loquaciousness and Somnabulence of Vampires
Review: Having just come down off a Kim Newman "Anno Dracula" high, I was hungry for another fix and Stableford's "Hunger & Ecstacy" seemed just the thing - a vampire novel balanced in the dimension between history and fiction, featuring H. G. Wells, Count Dracula, Nikolai Tesla, Holmes & Watson (albeit incognito).

What a letdown. I cannot imagine how any writer could come up with a great idea, a great cast of characters and what may be the richest period of history in...well, history...and still write a big, flopping catfish of a novel like this one. There is no action here - everyone sits around a table and yacks it up with the fictional Dr. Copplestone, an apparent drug-abuser, who manages to hallucinate the future of mankind through the judicious ingestion of a few magic mushrooms.

Rather than dismiss the old coot for the lunatic he is, the round-table of genius contemporaries actually sit and ruminate and philosophize and generally enable the good doctor. What eventually unspools is one of the dullest narratives since Silas Marner.

Rating:
Summary: The Loquaciousness and Somnabulence of Vampires
Review: Having just come down off a Kim Newman "Anno Dracula" high, I was hungry for another fix and Stableford's "Hunger & Ecstacy" seemed just the thing - a vampire novel balanced in the dimension between history and fiction, featuring H. G. Wells, Count Dracula, Nikolai Tesla, Holmes & Watson (albeit incognito).

What a letdown. I cannot imagine how any writer could come up with a great idea, a great cast of characters and what may be the richest period of history in...well, history...and still write a big, flopping catfish of a novel like this one. There is no action here - everyone sits around a table and yacks it up with the fictional Dr. Copplestone, an apparent drug-abuser, who manages to hallucinate the future of mankind through the judicious ingestion of a few magic mushrooms.

Rather than dismiss the old coot for the lunatic he is, the round-table of genius contemporaries actually sit and ruminate and philosophize and generally enable the good doctor. What eventually unspools is one of the dullest narratives since Silas Marner.