Barbara Hambly, Renfield: Slave of Dracula
Okay, props to Hambly for the early scenes in Sewell's lunatic asylum. I'm not saying Victorian private lunatic asylums are my Mastermind special subject or anything like that, but I know enough about them that my threshold for being jolted out of willing-suspension-of-disbelief (or muttering 'plagiarism! plagiarism!' when spotting where the details come from) is set pretty low. This was all good. I was in my comfort zone.
Also, neat use of Stoker's own multiple narrative devices.
Plus, really great backstory. So great I wish the novel had been more about this (brilliantly though it was all evoked and built up).
Because, downsides: the canonical characters. Possibly a bit too respectful of them? Because in the original they are all (except Mina) shining exemplars of what EM Forster defined in Aspects of the Novel as 'flat characters'. True, she does manage to round out Sewell somewhat, and to give a bit of depth to others, but not quite enough. Though perhaps it makes sense, given that in the original Renfield is a rather shadowy supporting character defined by weird habits and insanity, that in the story from his (admittedly monomaniacal) perspective, the main characters tend to be rather thin and shadowy.
The fact that the story was stuck with adherence to the main plot moves of the original worked against it a bit, I thought.
And, one big glaring problem for me: the allusions to Freud. In the present of the book he would only have published (jointly with Breuer) Studies in Hysteria. He hadn't yet published The Interpretation of Dreams. I.e. he was still a minor, if interesting, figure on the psychiatric horizon. I'm really not sure that an overworked asylum superintendent, however au fait with continental developments, would have heard of him. Dean Rapp's 1990 article demonstrated fairly conclusively that Freud's first UK readers were not so much the medical and psychiatric professions, more lay intellectuals. Sure, a few doctors were interested, but they were often a bit maverick.
Yes, I can see that Freud works awfully well, in the context of the ur-text, which has surely undergone numerous Freudian exegeses.
But it has the feel that the name has been put in as something the ordinary reader would recognise as resonant of fin-de-siecle thinking about the psyche, rather than the possibly rather more plausible contemporary names that the characters would have been likely to know and be reading (Maudsley? Clouston? even, if they were sufficiently avant-garde, Havelock Ellis and Krafft-Ebing, or maybe Lombroso?).
Overall verdict: readable, but not Hambly at her outstanding best.