Etienne Aubin – Dracula And The Virgins Of The Undead (NEL, 1974)
Peribury, Wiltshire.
It begins with the staking of local girl Maud Henderson. Before she died, Maud had been seen in the company of a mysterious stranger in a cloak. At night.
After her burial, two sheep are found with their throats torn out. They’ve been completely drained of blood!
The narrator, Adam Cochran, the village squire, decides to take a break from drinking Seagrams 100 Pipers, and sends for his boorish, proto-Hooray Henry friends, Staff and Douglas. They call themselves ‘the Warlocks’ and God, but I so wanted them to hurry up and die horribly. After consuming several more cases of Seagrams 100 Pipers, they decide the recent goings on are in some way connected to a blood cult who’ve been performing satanic rituals at Avebury stones. Cochran enlists a psychic to help him track Dracula and his eight brides to their lair … but can she be trusted?
If you ever wanted to find out what would happen if Richard Allen turned his hand to hacking out a vampire novel, then reading this one will probably be akin to a religious experience for you. Me, I found it hard going (quite an achievement: it’s only 124 pages long) and there definitely should have been more of the brides. I quite liked them. Apart from the cat, they were the most sympathetic characters. And I f**king hated the cat.
Dracula And The Virgins Of The Undead thread on Vault Of Evil
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