At first, I thought this was a YA Dracula spin-off - but that is not the case. It's an unofficial sequel, really, set just over a decade after the original novel. It follows many of the same characters from the previous book, namely Mina and Jonathan Harker, along with their son, Quincey. Despite being a modern publication, I found it to be really authentic in its historical tone - in fact, it reminded me a little of Lovecraft's writing.
I am definitely not going to attempt to outline the plot for two reasons: one, I just could not do it justice due to it being so intricate, and two, I wouldn't want to ruin it for any potential readers! What I will say is that Quincey's role turned out to be a bit different to how I expected, and the side-plot with Maurice Hallam and Gabriel Shone was surprisingly good (as well as important). There was a trip to the fabled castle of Count Dracula in Transylvania, and there were, of course, vampires. What more could you ask for?
I should probably also mention that it is not written as a book, but instead a collection of letters, transcripts and journal entries of various characters. This lent a very interesting view on things, with several different perspectives. There are a few notes added by Quincey, too, as he is compiling the documents.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this. The only reason I dropped half a star is that it was a little slow to get into in my opinion.

I made The Husband listen to Dracula with me in October. And we weren’t too happy with it. Although it has Great moments, they are lost between boredom and characters that make you puke in your mouth with their perfection. So obviously I made him listen to this ‘sequel’ as well! (I did receive an ecopy through Netgalley, but also picked up the audiobook).

And I have to say, I liked it. It definitely has its flaws; the concept was really far fetched and the characters are (still) idiots. But otherwise, Barnes has done a great job.

This does very much read like a sequel to the original. The writing style and atmosphere have been captured perfectly! But at the same time it is a lot more accessible to a modern audience. Although it is also a slow burn it feels like there is more action, the stakes are higher and the whole plot is ‘bigger’. The characters are given more depth. Quincy is the perfect amount of disturbing (think of the kids in The Haunting of Bly Manor). There is a gay ‘romance’, one of the characters is an alcoholic, another isn’t ready to become a mother and has massive mental struggles.

Barnes took on an ambitious job with this, and he absolutely nailed it. This won’t be for everyone. You definitely need to be in the mood for it, and you need to have read, and appreciated, the original. But if you do, and you want more… this book really does Stoker’s Dracula justice.

I did not enjoy this tale simply because the writing was not to my taste. A great premise, poorly executed.

I really enjoyed this continuation of Dracula, it was better than some I’ve read before. It was the perfect read for Halloween.

It is never easy to write a sequel to a classic novel but J.S. Barnes managed to pull it off. I actually managed to reread Dracula before I read Dracula's Child so it was interesting to be able to compare the original novel to the sequel written by a modern author.
Dracula's Child is written in much the same format as Dracula. The writing style is so similar to the orginal novel as is the way language is used.
It has the same dark, claustrophobic, and gothic feel to it which is impressive considering it was written 123 years later than the original classic.
I would recommend reading or rereading Dracula itself so you can understand the plot but this is really a fitting successor to Dracula.

Time has passed since Jonathan and Mina Harker have returned to England after their ordeal of killing Dracula in Transylvania. Quincey is given a small birthday party with the guests including Van Helsing. A tragedy with Van Helsing at the party cause Mina to worry about her son’s strangeness. Jonathan deals with it by drinking more And more while Mina starts writing in her diary.

The novel is told by diary entries, newspaper clippings, and letters. I felt as I read this book as if I was there experiencing what was happening. I felt that I understand Dracula better. I liked that experience. The novel has some twists and turns that I did not anticipate. The author has done an exquisite job of writing this novel. It is an excellent sequel to Dracula.

A creepy cover, and a must for fans for Dracula.
In this we’re asked to imagine that Dracula didn’t die, and that he has spent years plotting his revenge and planning to take over the world. The moment I saw this on NetGalley I was hoping to be approved to read it.
Set years after the events of Dracula, we pick up with Mina and Jonathan Harker learning to enjoy life with their young child, Quincey. Events early on show that they are going to have a tough time, and we get many clues that Dracula has set events in place to culminate in his domination of England. Nobody is sure where or when the attack will happen, but it’s evident it will be fierce and something few are expected to survive.
The writing style is similar to Dracula, and the approach certainly encourages us to consider how to tackle such an obvious threat.
This would have been a 5 star read, but it took me SO LONG to get through this and to feel like I was getting anywhere. Part of the issue was with me, where I didn’t really get into it so dipped in and out while I read other things. I was expecting a lot, and this didn’t really live up to my expectations in the way I’d hoped. Once we shifted to part three I found myself more engrossed and keen to see how it developed, but it took far too long to create that feeling and this, for me, is a weakness.

The story is compelling, dark, and exuberant! Perfect choice for your spooky reads. I'll recommend this book to readers who love classical horror and gothic novels. The world-building and the characters' developments are just--chef kiss!

This story is like a slow cooker meal, it goes little by little until you taste it and 🤯. Surprisingly, it works very well and respects the original work.

I was given an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review courtesy of @titanbooks and @netgalley

This book is a spiritual successor to the original Dracula novel, going so far as to be written in the same style by telling the story through a series of diary entries, letters, and newspaper stories.

While the style is similar I found the story in this case to be too expansive. Bram Stoker only had a small amount of character journals as POVs, while Dracula’s Child has a seemingly endless number of POVs and it really muddled the plot and made the plot a challenge to understand.

I feel also that the story had some unnecessary characters and elements that caused the book to slow to almost a crawl in the middle act. The story found its ground in the end but it was a long time getting there.
I enjoyed the overall looming dread this novel achieves and the nods to the original Dracula scattered throughout.

My main problem with this book is that in the beginning it had a sort of feminist agenda with a few of strong female characters and showcasing the gender role disparities, but by 3/4ths through the book almost all of them were gone from the story or useless, leaving us with a bland guys club to save the day yet again.

This was a solid read if you’re a big fan of the original, but just not very memorable or interesting

A stunning literary offering. This book is, like the original 'Dracula', an epistolary novel, presented in the form of letters, articles, and journal entries. Also much like the original, it starts with an agonizing slowness and builds to a crashing crescendo of a climax.

This books picks up thirteen years after the events of the original, when life has returned to a relative normalcy for those who fought against the darkness in Transylvania. All the old characters are here: Jonathan and Mina Harker, Arthur Holmwood, Jack Seward, Van Helsing, and of course, the Count himself:

"I begin to see the outline of a larger design. I can see the ways in which all of us have been hamstrung and distracted.... And what is emerging once more from the darkness, onto centre stage, while we five are all so ruinously debilitated? We know his name of course. We know it of old."

And new to the cast: young Quincey Harker, the son of Jonathan and Mina, whose twelfth birthday marks the beginning of this tale, and whose soul will hang in the balance soon afterward.

The characters are all so beautifully, realistically flawed, that you can't help love and pity them, even as some of them do terrible things.

If you loved 'Dracula', you will love 'Dracula's Child'. You will feel yourself immersed in the story, the pain, the fear, the horror, and the mad struggle of good vs evil. You will race across England by foot, train, and car; you will, with mad fury, pound stakes into the hearts of the vicious undead; you will fight against the rising panic as all that you love is endangered.

I loved this book. The writing style was so utterly similar to that of Stoker himself that I wonder if perhaps old Bram was a vampire and has reemerged under the name JS Barnes.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Not my usual genre. I did enjoy it, but I don’t think it’s one I’ll be recommending to others, unless they’re fans of Stoker.

Dracula is an absolute classic, a staple of the horror genre, a key Gothic text. Even if you haven’t read the novel, you know the story, you know the characters, you’ve seen it played out so many times and read stories based off it, seen the effects Dracula has had on vampires in the 20th Century. So what more, you might ask, could be added to Dracula and the vampire mythos? How could a sequel be written to one of the foundational horror texts?

Well, if you are asking that, and if you are dubious of another tale revolving around Mina, Jonathan, Van Helsing and the rest of their small group, I promise – Dracula’s Child is a fantastic, excellent sequel, and one which takes some of the best elements for other reimagining’s, bounces off the original, and creates something refreshing yet familiar.

There are some elements in this book – outside the characters themselves – similar to the graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the TV series Penny Dreadful, and the novel Anno Dracula. But Barnes absolutely makes these characters his own.

Years after defeating Dracula, Jonathan and Mina host an anniversary dinner with their friends, and celebrate their son Quincey’s birthday. But shadows draw around the group, and something strange is happening to the family and their friends. Meanwhile, two men on a tour of Europe encounter a strange woman in the forests of Romania.

Like the original Dracula, Dracula’s Child follows an epistolary format, presented as Quincey Harper putting together various journals, articles, letters and telegrams from the time. It works well, and really helps the Gothic feel to the novel, making it feel all the more like a continuation of the original.

The other plus side to the diary-entry format is how easily it is to get inside the heads of the characters, yet when they hold some information back it still feels realistic, giving the impression of people almost too scared to confront what is actually happening. I liked how Barnes also gave much more time to Mina, and it’s always great to see her in a more active role in any Dracula story.

This is a fantastic, solid read, and if you like the original classic, I have no doubt you’ll love dipping back into this world and reuniting with these characters. Barnes has done an amazing job.

Thank you to Titan for providing a copy of this book via NetGalley.

this was a great horror novel, I think it worked really well as a sequel to Dracula. The characters were great and I was caught in this world when reading.

I was so glad to see this book on NetGalley, I immediately asked an ARC and was really glad to receive it!
So glad because Dracula is one of my favorite books of all times and I love to read retellings like Anno Dracula or sequels like Dracula: The Undead! I can't wait to read Dracul!

So I entered this book open, excited and just wanting to get back to my favorite characters: Mina, Jack and, of course, Dracula!
I was not disappointed!

First, I loved the story within a story: Quincey is the editor of the book placed into the reader's hands, and he is not telling the story. J.S. Barnes decided to get back to Bram Stoker's format: diary entries, letters, memorandum, articles from newspapers, and so on! I really appreciated that! Moreover, I found the author's writing quite good! The way he structures his sentences is quite agreeable and matches with the period of the story, the beginning of the twentieth century!

Then, of course, I loved all the vampire aspect of this book! I loved that the characters don't dare to admit what they encountered and can't write the word in their papers. J.S. Barnes seems to have exacerbated the erotic side of the creature: some passages of this book would never have been written by Bram Stoker in the 1890s I think. It adds something more, but it didn't always feel necessary to me.
I loved how the story goes, the direction it takes, the twists and turns: it was quite gripping, even if it was also frustrating! Indeed, at some point, I didn't know what to expect anymore and the tension was building so much I was afraid it would collapsed badly.
I was not entirely wrong in that, but I'll get back to it later.

I also loved to, as I said earlier, get back to my favorite characters. From the first time I read Dracula, I fell in love with Mina. Because of the misogyny of the period, in the original book, she is considered "more than an ordinary woman", "a man in a female body", "strong and capable". She was, clearly, the cleverest character, meaning that she understood the Count's schemes and was ignored by her male companions ... because she was a woman! This time... well, she's still the cleverest, she still sees clear through the fog shrouding the characters, she is the one who understands. So, Mina is exactly as she were in the original book.
Jack Seward, the alienist: my favorite male character with Van Helsing! I thought he was less... arrogant, I'd say? In the original story, he realizes quickly that he doesn't understand vampirism and what is happening to people around him. In this book, I'll just say he is "off track": his storyline differs from his companions. I'll say no more, but I loved to follow him. Only regret: I would have loooooooved to learn more about something that "happens" to him!
Jonathan and Arthur are characters I like, but I'm not a huge fan of them. Jonathan, here, is still traumatised by his Transylvanian experience: he can't recover, and... well, let's say at some point, he feels like a coward. As for Arthur, maybe just like in Dracula, he feels a bit in the background, probably because he doesn't keep a diary? He feels less close to the reader, and so I got less pleasure in following him.
Other characters are present there, like Maurice Hallam, Quincey Harker, Gabriel Shone or Ileana; but I don't want to say too much, so I'll just let you discover them.

And now, to the only disappointing aspect of the book to me: the ending.
It felt way too quick for the amount of pages spent on building momentum! I was a bit like: "What?... All of this for just this?!" In seconds, everything is explained and resolved. I felt let down by this ending. And after that, the epilogue feels too long, anticlimactic - even if it is still interesting to know what happened to some of the surviving characters.
Moreover, there's one element that feels close to illogical to me, but I can't talk about it without spoiling it. Let's say I didn't expect that at all!
The only part I loved in this ending was when we get back to Quincey as the narrator!

So, I had a really good time, until the ending which wasn't as good as the building promised it to be! Still I recommand it!

Can I just say, wow!
First, this is an extraordinary achievement. To write a fully cohesive story with the same tone and archaic language used by Bram Stoker and bringing back the original characters almost as accurately as I can recall is something that is already hard enough to imagine but far more arduous to implement.
That alone has my attention and admiration.
Second, the nostalgia! I have always been a huge fan of Dracula and this book took me on a journey back to the dark castle, the treacherous mountains, the English countryside and the bustling streets of London. I loved the experience.
Third, the parallels between the two books was well thought out.
I liked the book overall even though it became a bit slow in the middle and I am getting impatient for some action but then bloodshed started again and I was satiated (wow look at me using vampire words). The first half was very successful in capturing the true gothic essence of the original and it was what made it tick. The ending is a cliffhanger which means there probably is going to be a sequel in the near future. Don't say, I didn't warn you.
Highly recommended if you are a fan of the vampire classic. Though it might get slow at times, it is worth it.
Thank you Titan books and Netgalley for the e-ARC.

I love Dracula. One might even say it is my favorite horror novel of all time so when I saw this book, I knew I had to read it. I was not disappointed.

This book is also told in epistolary format. I thought this was a good choice. It made the story different from what we typically see in novels these days.

The story was a bit of a slow burn but I really enjoyed it and of course the characters and the story kept me intrigued and wondering what was going to happen.

I really liked this novel. I would recommend it if you liked the original Dracula and wanted to read something similar to it. It is great for October and Halloween scares.

Mina and Jonathan Harker survived the terror of Transylvania, and its shadow is falling over their marriage. As a result, Jonathan is drinking, Mina feels alone, and their son Quincey struggles to live up to their reputation. Tragedy brings them together with old friends, just as a new evil is rising.

As with the original novel Dracula, this is an epistolary fic. It's a collection of journals, telegrams, and newspaper clippings. All the survivors from Dracula are here at the outset in the prologue, and Van Helsing himself makes a dire prophecy on Quincey's twelfth birthday. As the story proper begins, we meet Maurice Hallam and Gabriel Shone, a pair of Englishmen traveling through Europe; Maurice adores Gabriel and accepts that he can't physically touch him, but can travel with him searching for new experiences. We also learn about the Council of Athelstan, which can usurp Parliament in emergencies. These seemingly disparate threads, much like in Bram Stoker's novel, appear to have little in common at first. But the traveling men are brought to Castle Dracula, the old group from the original novel are plagued by bad luck, and Quincey's behavior varies wildly. Many of the characters describe the feeling of a shadow coming in from the east, increasing the sense of dread as time goes by.

As a reader, we know what the title means and that Dracula is going to be resurrected in some way. Or perhaps we recognize the word strigoi when the Englishmen don't and recognize the odd behaviors that Gabriel begins to exhibit after they visit Castle Dracula. In a way, the second half of the book reminds me of Kim Neuman's Anno Dracula, in that vampires seed the aristocracy and entire villages are made up of vampires. Only a handful of mortals intend to thwart the Count as he tries to recreate a feudal society in England with himself at the helm. Killing the undead isn't easy, and Dracula's Child mirrors the gothic horror of Bram Stoker. Fans of the classic will love this entry in the mythos.

If you are looking for a good Halloween read, this is definitely a good option! This novel is designed to be a sequel to the original story of Dracula, and it captures the vibe of the original well.

𝚆𝚛𝚒𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚂𝚝𝚢𝚕𝚎
The novel is conveyed in a similar way as the original Dracula novel. I found this to be one of the strengths of this novel. Barnes did very well with the old-fashioned writing. Also, as with Dracula, the novel is conveyed through journal entries and letters. So, I appreciated this stylistic nod to the original and felt like it was well executed. One downfall is that it did take me time to keep everyone straight when we would switch to a new journal article / perspective and to keep track of everyone. However, the transitions between various journals / letters was smooth otherwise.

𝚂𝚞𝚜𝚙𝚎𝚗𝚜𝚎𝚏𝚞𝚕 𝚂𝚝𝚘𝚛𝚢𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚎
There was something that occurred in the beginning that I didn’t like (connected to one of the trigger warnings). And there were times in the beginning that the novel had a slow build up. I do tend to like novels that are a slow burn, and so I enjoyed this, and at the same time, still think the very beginning could have gone a bit faster. However, after that I thought the suspense built up nicely. While it would be hard for it to match the quality of the classic Bram Stoker version of the novel, this felt like a good follow-up, as it did such a good job of building a similar atmosphere!

"An old truth of the world is here presented: that to make a thing forbidden is to fill the souls of those who are warned against it with unquenchable thirst."

"'All over Europe,' she said, 'the shadow is falling now. we must prepare for the hour of his return."

----------------------------------------------------------

Dracula's Child perfectly recreates the tone and feel of Bram Stoker's original. The writing style reads like that of his own hand.  Through a series of letters, journal entries, telegrams and newspaper articles we rejoin Mina, Jonathan and Arthur in England some years after their showdown with the Count. Each is coping with the psychological after-effects of having lived through such terror.  The Harkers are raising their son, who is quite unusual and dare I say, a little creepy.

This is a real slow burn of a book, similar to the original.  The first third is a cozy, revisiting with our favorite characters. It feels like picking up with old friends. I will say Jonathan has taken a bit of a turn that I did not enjoy but we all respond to trauma differently.  We begin to see the elements of darkness building. The second third is a slow build of the suspense to the final showdown. This part was slightly overly long for me personally. I needed either more action or less contemplative pages.  The final third was absolutely perfect, the absolute horror of an unleashed horde of vampires and the arrogant elegance of The Count is exactly what I wanted. 

This one gets 4.5 stars from me.

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review.