Dinner with Dracula: Being the Weird Adventures of Archeologist Charles Winterbottom with Azathoth, Cthulhu, a certain Prince of the Undead, the Dark Gods of Lemuria, the Yeti Queen – And Other Terrifying Creatures of the Night.

by Joe Vadalma

A wildly comic romp through the realm of supernatural horror that will have
fans of Weird Tales laughing themselves sick and set H. P. Lovecraft spinning
in his grave. Charles Winterbottom thinks he's a heroic-adventurer
archeologist in the mode of Indiana Jones. But if he's not, Winterbottom at
least gets into more deadly perils in a day than Indiana does in a year. It's
getting out of them that's hard! Discovering an unknown civilization in an
underground catacomb, Winterbottom is immediately captured by the
inhabitants and sentenced to be fed to the demon god Azathoth for
desecrating a sacred place. As he stares in to the vast, reeking maw of
Azatoth, about to be eaten and shaking in his boots, Winterbottom has not
one clue about how to escape. And if knew what lay ahead – encounters with
supernatural beings infinitely more terrifying than Azatoth! – Winterbottom
would throw himself voluntarily down that demon's gaping maw. Beyond, and
infinitely more deadly, than all those perils, at the end of his adventure lies
an elegant dinner with a well-known Transylvanian count – with Winterbottom
as the main course! Dinner with Dracula is a screwball take on a certain Mythos, and is sure to remind readers of the wacky landscapes and characters of Piers Anthony, Terry Prachett, Robert Adams, and Randall Garrett.

Genres: Humor, Horror

170 pages, Nook

First published February 1, 2009

Reviews

[Mike · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are only three words necessary to describe this book. To quote Theodor Geisel (that's Dr. Seuss to most). Stink, stank, stunk! I would prefer green eggs and ham, or the onion and pickle sandwich with arsenic sauce.

I enjoy humor and spoofs of all kinds, read Bored of the Rings: A Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings for a fun spoof of The Lord of the Rings, but this was horrible.

The first problem is that there were so many spelling errors, and, OK, I admit that I'm a stickler for spelling, but come on, there really is a limit. At first I thought that this might be some kind of translation issue, but I think they'd spell the name of the nation "Chili" correctly. Seriously, though, the spelling issues in this piece of...I hesitate to call it fiction...are so rudimentary that it looks like someone just typed it up in Word and trusted the spell checker! By the way, just because a word is spell correctly doesn't mean it's correct. Just ask the people of "Chili".

Problem, the second, would have to be the sexual exploits of our intrepid archeologist. I have to admit that I criticized George R.R. Martin for his rather stark (the pun wasn't intended, but I like it now, so it stays), unrelenting frankness regarding sex and sexual discussion (read: innuendo) in his work. Now I feel almost nostalgic for the halcyon days of A Game of Thrones. It's like the book was written in the style of those Two Wild & Crazy Guys from Saturday Night Live, and of course they were only funny because of their ineptitude.

Finally and most terrible of all, his jokes are just not funny. Not funny at all. How can you write a spoof and not be funny.

No matter how hard I scrub I still feel dirty. It just won't come off! I wasn't this disappointed since I read An Evil Guest. Although in that book's defense, it was a well-written book, just not what I was expecting. This particular book is an abysmal train wreck. A horrid evil mess. I'm just going to sit here and weep quietly for our literary heritage.