Café de Nuit

I recently received this novel from a friend, and I have to say so far its pretty good. Without giving anything away, the story is basically a reimagining of the original Bram Stoker "Dracula" with some new characters, centered around the madman Renfield. Hambly seems to do a good job flushing out a character that seemed kind of 2-dimensional in Stoker's original novel.


Anyone else read this book or plan on reading it?

Read it myself. Interesting and imaginative for the first half of the book, then gets...how shall I put it?..."bad" once the Brides show up.

It actually reminded me a lot of Jeanne Kalodogris's "Diaries of the Family Dracul" series, which has a wonderful first book, a solid second book, and a complete load of drek for a third book. What is it about people reimagining Dracula that compels them to take sharp left turns in the plot near the end of the story. At least in, for example, Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape or P.N. Elrod's Quincey Morris, Vampire (her weakest book, IMHO), they play "fair" by warning the reader up front that there are drastic changes being made...

Holy crap! Finally someone else who's read Kalogridis's work! I asked about that on the Kargatane board once, and nobody else had anything to say about it.

Sorry, didn't mean to hijack the thread there.

Sylaire wrote:Read it myself. Interesting and imaginative for the first half of the book, then gets...how shall I put it?..."bad" once the Brides show up.

It actually reminded me a lot of Jeanne Kalodogris's "Diaries of the Family Dracul" series, which has a wonderful first book, a solid second book, and a complete load of drek for a third book. What is it about people reimagining Dracula that compels them to take sharp left turns in the plot near the end of the story. At least in, for example, Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape or P.N. Elrod's Quincey Morris, Vampire (her weakest book, IMHO), they play "fair" by warning the reader up front that there are drastic changes being made...

I guess everybody has to have their own "piece of the pie" and rewrite the classic novel in their own way.

BTW, I agree with you about Elrod's "Quincy", it was pretty good up through the middle, and her characterization of the Count is pretty spot on, but the ending kind of ruined it for me as well.

Thanks for the response, I'm eager to finish "Renfield" now to see what crazy stuff the author does at the end of the book.

Out of curiosity, what did you think of it?

I had put this book on the side for a while, and I just picked it up again last week and finally finished it. For me, the beginning was a little slow to get started, but things actually really took off when the brides arrived. Hambly's story, to me anyway, seemed rambling and a little dull up until this point, and the arrival of some new characters kind of turned the novel on its head so to speak, and really changed up things to make the plot interesting to me.

All together, I have to give Hambly a lot of credit for giving Stoker's original character Renfield some much needed background. In this book you find out why it was that Renfield went crazy, and why he was so easily manipulated by Dracula. When you find out the reason for Renfield's insanity, the reveal is just astounding!

As far as the ending, I have to say that while it was a departure from Stoker's original work, I really enjoyed it. I'm glad that the ending that Hambly had been hinting at from the beginning didn't take place, and that she went her own way with it.

Overall I'd give this book a 9/10. While Stoker purists might not care for some of the liberties that the Hambly takes with the characters, I thought that she went far with what was already there and made some plausible alterations to create her own original work. Be warned though, that the book takes a little while to get into, and part of the battle is just getting through the first fifty pages. Fans of the original might not care for it.

I loved Stoker's original and RENFIELD as well. Poignant, well-written, and engaging. I got through this novel in just a few hours. Hambly made the characters more three-dimensional and the ending is smashing!

Interesting input. I'm glad others have read and enjoyed this book!

I'll have to try and look this one up somewhere. I absolutely loved Hambly's Dragonsbane books.