Stoker's Wilde by Steven Hopstaken and Melissa Prusi

"Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde join forces to face a vampire cult determined to open the gates of hell."

Now this book had me intrigued with only the byline on the cover. I'm a huge fan of the gothic classic Stoker's Dracula and Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and if you are too, you will love this tale.



Years before either becomes a literary legend, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde must overcome their disdain for one another to battle the Black Bishop, a mysterious madman wielding supernatural forces to bend the British Empire to his will. With the help of a European vampire expert, a spirited actress and an American businessman, our heroes fight werewolves, vampires and the chains of Victorian morality. The action will take them to dark forests in Ireland, through the upper-class London theater world and culminates in an exciting showdown at Stonehenge, where Bram and Oscar must stop a vampire cult from opening the gates of Hell.

I absolutely loved this book and upon writing this review I can't think of anything bad to say about it. Stoker's Wilde is a brilliant book, its clear the authors really know their subject matter. The characters of Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde are really believable and their opposing natures compliment each other really well. There's some great comic moments between these two. I really liked both characters but Wilde was by far my favourite.

This book felt so real as I read it and I felt like I had come into a secret knowledge over how the two great books of Stoker and Wilde came to be written. The references to their works and lives are very clever.

In the same spirit of Dracula, this novel is written through letters of correspondence, journal entries and recordings carefully put together in one collection by the mysterious White Worm society. The tale of Stoker's Wilde starts off in Dublin when Stoker and Wilde are forced to unite against a werewolf wreaking havoc in Ireland. It was meant to be the adventure of a lifetime but for them it is only the beginning. Soon they are drawn into the affairs of a secret vampire cult in London and must work through their differences if they and their loved ones, and also the whole world, are to survive the Black Bishop.

This book is great fun and doesn't take itself seriously, it will appeal to anyone who loves adventure stories, secret societies Victorians, vampires such as Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, supernatural creatures, things that go bump in the night and the wit of Oscar Wilde.

I'm itching to re-read Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray but the dilemma is which one to read first.





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