For those unfamiliar with the originals, there may be some pleasure in exploring the unrelentingly grim atmosphere Kiste brings to 1960s San Francisco, but others can safely skip this. Devotees of Dracula and Jane Eyre will be baffled by Kiste’s unrecognizable updates of the characters. The novel attempts to condemn misogynist abuse but delights in and eroticizes its depictions of female victimization, making it feel less daring and nuanced in its depictions of female resistance to gendered cruelty than the 19th-century novels that inspired it. That’s exactly the world conjured up by Kiste’s new. 2, Dracula Beyond Stoker: Dracula and Tales from The Moonlit Path. Her recent and upcoming work can be found in Hear Us Scream: The Voices of Horror Vol. Lucy and Bertha conveniently fall in with a group of hippies as they work to rescue Jane and take down both evil men. Imagine Dracula’s Lucy Westerna and Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason as undead immortals residing in California during 1967’s Summer of Love. Gleason has been a college English professor since 2008, has three published books and was nominated for Best of The Net by Punk Monk in 2022. Rochester, reenvisioned as a cross between Hugh Hefner and Charles Manson, who keeps a harem of barefoot women and forces Jane to join in erotic cult-worship of a revived Dracula. Jane then returns to San Francisco and Mr. Narrator Carlotta Brentan’s voicing of Lucy, the tale’s narrator, is noteworthy, bolstering Kiste’s characterization of a woman who is cynical and slow to trust, but is endowed with a will that even Van Helsing would have admired.In the meandering, miserable latest from three-time Bram Stoker Award winner Kiste ( The Rust Maidens), vampire Lucy Westenra of Dracula, and a mysteriously undead “Bee,” Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre, live together in 1967 L.A.-until an offensively mischaracterized Jane Eyre, here cowed, beaten down, and in cahoots with evil men, arrives at their doorstep and frees Dracula’s remains from the urns in which Lucy has been imprisoning him. This historical horror can seem like a kitchen sink of different ideas, but Kiste pulls it all together with her superb worldbuilding and focus on the two dynamic heroines.
Rochester soon rear their devilishly handsome heads during the Summer of Love, and the women travel to the Haight-Ashbury District to stop them. Lucy vigilantly guards the urns holding Dracula’s ashes, while Bee does everything she can to ignore the supernatural siren call of Edward Rochester, Jane Eyre’s problematic husband. The two women lived for many years in a decaying house in Los Angeles circa 1967. Lucy Westenra and Bertha “Bee” Mason lived beyond the stories in which they were merely plot devices. From Gwendolyn Kiste ( Boneset & Feathers) comes the continuing story of two women practically ignored in gothic literature.
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