Friday, September 21, 2012

Incarnation-Emma Cornwall

Incarnation


Emma Cornwall

Gallery, Sep 18 2012, $15.00

ISBN: 9781439190357



In 1897 Lucy Weston attends a performance of Aida at London’s Royal Opera House. Her next conscious thought is being inside a narrow wooden box as she feels she was buried alive but not in a designed coffin. She needs blood while recovering from her ordeal inside her family’s vacant house.



As her memory returns with what the stranger did to her that night when her father snoozed while she watches Verdi, she finds a book Dracula by Bram Stoker that allegedly tells her tale. Irate as the author’s account is fiction, Lucy travels to London to confront her biographer and the stranger. She never expected to team up with the man who vilified her in his novel.



This is an engaging rendition of the classic Dracula using metafiction in making Bram Stoker a key character. The exciting storyline brings alive (ironically through an Undead) Victorian England, but never quite decides which genre between steampunk, horror or a hybrid of the two; I would have preferred classic horror. Well written this is an entertaining thriller as Lucy returns to London.



Harriet Klausner

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