The Book of Renfield
A Gospel of Dracula
Published on 11. April 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
340 pages
978-1-62601-654-5 (ISBN)
Description
"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.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 20 mm
Weight
553 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62601-654-5 (9781626016545)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
TIM LUCAS is the author of four well-received novels: Throat Sprockets (1994), The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (2005, revised 2023), The Secret Life of Love Songs (2021) and The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes (2022). Throat Sprockets, which is included in Jones & Newman's Horror: Another 100 Best Books and was selected by Rue Morgue as one of 50 essential alternative horror novels, is set to be published in an expanded 30th anniversary edition by Valancourt Books. The revised edition of The Book of Renfield, published by Riverdale Avenue Books, won the 2023 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Classic Monster Fiction.Tim is now in the fifth decade of his career as a film critic, essayist and journalist specializing in horror/fantasy cinema, which began when his first publication appeared in Cinefantastique magazine at the age of 15. He and his wife Donna (who passed away in 2022) published the much honored and influential Video Watchdog magazine from 1990 to 2018. His writings on film have appeared in other publications around the world, including Sight & Sound (where his "NoZone" column ran for almost ten years), Film Comment, American Cinematographer, Cahiers du Cinéma, Starfix, Metro, Little Shoppe of Horrors, Eyeball and Fear, as well as his long-running blog Video WatchBlog.He has also written two movie monographs, Videodrome (2008) and Spirits of the Dead (2018). A third monograph, focused on Franco's film Succubus (aka Necronomicon), is awaiting publication. He is also the author of Mario Bava - All the Colors of the Dark (2007), a monolithic critical biography on the life and works of the Italian filmmaker heralded as the "Maestro of the Macabre".Well-known as a prolific audio commentator, Tim has produced more than 150 lecture tracks released on DVD, Blu-ray and 4K Blu-ray discs all over the world.His work has been honored with two Saturn Awards (for Mario Bava - All the Colors of the Dark and his commentary for Kino Lorber's Blu-ray release of Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat), the Independent Publishers Bronze Medal Award and the International Horror Guild Award. He additionally holds a record 22 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Film Awards, including their Legacy Award; in 2011, he and Donna were inducted into their Monster Kid Hall of Fame. Tim is presently working on a number of new book projects, including an intensive study of the Adults Only films of Joe Sarno.