Mr Stoker and the Vampires of the Lyceum – review

Author: Matthew Gibson

First Published: 2023

Contains spoilers

The Blurb: London, September 1888. Jack the Ripper roams the streets. A scream rings out from beneath the stage of the Lyceum Theatre…

A young ‘actress’ has been attacked, suffering peculiar bite wounds to her neck; an event that announces a series of strange, vampiric happenings, and thrusts an unwitting Bram Stoker – acting manager of the Lyceum and aspiring author – into the limelight, and the action.

Increasingly perplexed by the unsettling behaviour of his 'Guv’nor’, the brilliant but mercurial actor, Henry Irving, and Irving’s acclaimed leading lady, Ellen Terry, Stoker soon starts suspecting the worst. And then, another attack reveals a vicious Prussian baron, returned to London as a vampire seeking revenge…

Alive with Gothic intrigue, reversal and surprise, Mr Stoker will keep the reader enthralled and confounded until its final, shocking scene – indeed, until its very last word.

The review: That an author should seek to create a fictionalised version of Stoker and pit him against vampires is, I think, perfectly natural and we have had several versions – both where the book is focused on Bram Stoker and others where he is an incidental character. We have also had a variety of quality in previous usage of the trope, but I am please to report that Matthew Gibson creates one of the better explorations of this narrative.

The author builds a believable world around the Lyceum Theatre and Stoker, with characters that are, of course, fictionalised but nevertheless have authentic personalities. Stoker is our primary character and Gibson walks that thin line that balances not making him unbelievably good/powerful/clever but also not being disrespectful to the memory of the man he uses at the heart of his character. We get a Stoker frustrated with life, at times, sometimes incredulous but also thoughtful and, most importantly, the character is built as a rounded individual. Drawn into this is George Stoker, an interesting inclusion who, in some respects, takes on the Van Helsing role, his time in the Balkans giving him an insight to the myths that the elder Stoker becomes more and more convinced are real.

Railed against them is Baron Vassil Drayfield-Lucarda, the last part of his double-barrel name awfully familiar, of course. The Baron is a Rosicrucian obsessed both with finding immortality and also avenging himself on people within Stoker’s inner circle. The question that haunts them all is, is vampirism real or could there be a more rational explanation?

The book is a mystery story at its heart but it is one that assuredly keeps your attention. The language feels deliberately of a distant age, falling comfortably into the 19th Century setting. This was a fine walk through an alternate history, with enough reaching to recorded history to offer a veneer of veracity to the account. Worthwhile. 8 out of 10.

In Paperback @ Amazon US

In Paperback @ Amazon UK