The third volume in a dark fantasy series in which classic monsters are pitted against the forces of evil.

In this follow-up to Destroy All Monsters (2024), DeGuire continues the adventures of an unlikely cast that includes Count Dracula; his werewolf bride, Aoife, with whom he has two small were-pup children; an invisible man named Ralph Ellison; and Capt. Saul Frankenstein, son of the famous Victor. As this latest novel opens, Dracula is imprisoned on the infamous island of Dr. Moreau, where “the bad doctor” has given the ailing vampire, who was staked in the chest, a transplanted human heart. Moreau is bent on flooding the world with his weird animal-hybrid creatures, but Dracula’s main aim is to escape, perhaps with the help (and certainly with the life-sustaining blood) of revived saber-toothed tigers, woolly mammoths, and even yetis. Meanwhile, Dracula’s bride, children, and friends, all desperate to know his fate, are enlisted to combat Moreau by Scotland Yard’s chief inspector and his physician friend—none other than Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. The hunt for Moreau’s creatures and the quest to thwart his plans take the characters all over the world—a contemporary one with modern slang, profanity, and GPS monitoring—and fans of classic literature will be pleased by the appearance of one additional villain, known as a “mastermind of malevolence.” DeGuire liberally litters his chapters with allusions and literary easter eggs, designed to delight those who’ve followed the series from the opening volume.

The pages have a good deal of third-in-a-series momentum, and readers picking up the books for the first time would be well advised to start at the beginning. DeGuire writes with tremendous brio throughout, filling his chapters with lines such as “The night cursed the day as any semblance of sun or moon was obscured by the sky’s toxic rotation” or “The Count screeched and fell back on his ass as the zombie infant chattered its rotten teeth in his face, spewing forth remnants of dead flesh and poor taste.” The narrative never takes itself too seriously; characters speak in contemporary idiom (Dracula, for instance, is sometimes referred to as “Drac”), and the author revels in the absurdities he manages to work into the story; for example, it turns out that virtually anything can be turned undead if Dracula tries hard enough. The prose sometimes drifts into the absurd, and the novel’s snark and irreverence sometimes hamper the melodrama of a breakneck race to rescue the world from destruction. Readers of Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s comic-book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and other literary pastiches will be familiar with the antics that keep this plot bubbling along, and DeGuire does it all with energy and irreverent humor, albeit without much depth. His Holmes doesn’t read much like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes, for instance, and his Dracula, the star of the show, is fairly unrecognizable as Bram Stoker’s character. Still, DeGuire weaves the various players into a tapestry that’s entertaining all the same.

A full-throttle, pulpy conclusion to a three-part monster mash.

DeGuire’s second installment of the Holiday Spirit series tells a tale of a cadre of monsters and legends under threat from the government and malevolent forces in modern-day Paris.

Bridgett Bishop, a vengeful witch from Killington, Vermont, who kidnapped many of the town’s children, has been thwarted, and the kids have been returned safely. However, an all-star roster of other mythical monsters remains; right from the start, Aoife, a werewolf, executes an action-packed, death-defying rescue mission to save her master and true love, Count Dracula. When those plans go awry, Aoife, Dracula, and Frankenstein’s monster are waylaid by the French government and brought to an island in Paris’ Seine River, where they’re interrogated by—who else?—the infamous Dr. Moreau. As the doctor grills his sedated “patients,” King Kong breaks into the facility, stealing away Aoife. As the pair fly toward freedom—Kong has a functioning wingsuit, in this iteration—they confront French paramilitary forces, but not before a notable piece of Kong’s anatomy destroys Notre Drame cathedral and kills a dozen tourists. The pair are quickly sentenced to death by a hastily assembled French court and await their fate in prison. Meanwhile, a group of Killington students who survived the witchy horrors have just arrived in the City of Light on an educational trip. Among them is young Dorian Gray Luminita, son of Maria Claudia Luminita, who finds him on the streets of Paris to warn him of his peculiar fate. Not long after the students arrive, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, his lover Esmeralda, and her demon goat, Djali, bring chaos to Paris Fashion Week, unleashing a host of plagues that endanger everyone from fashion designers to actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

As in the first novel of the series, there is quite a lot of incident in this book, with monsters and myths frequently crashing into one another in action-packed sequences. The overall effect can be charming, but DeGuire’s follow-up seems to lack some of the light touch that made its predecessor a lot more fun. In this book, it sometimes feels as if the author is reaching for a greater point or a lesson, as in this passage, spoken by Kong: “Facebook falsehoods and Instagram insight allow the human experiment to continue along its strange path toward an even more indiscernible future. The pendulum swings, settling eventually somewhere between chaos and cognition.” Such moments often come off as pedantic and off-putting, especially in a novel with so much preposterousness and impossibility. Readers who enjoyed the wackiness of the first series entry will find some of the same appeal here, but the novelty has largely worn off and the author’s command of the Paris setting does not feel as natural as it does with the New England locale of the last installment. Overall, the work is a valiant attempt to maintain the excitement of the original but, in the end, it only shows how difficult it can be to keep a good thing going.

A lively romp, but one that fails to capture the same magic as its predecessor.

DeGuire presents a spooky tale of an aging witch embarking on a mission of vengeance in a town in rural Vermont that’s rife with horrors.

At the opening of this debut novel, elderly Bridgett Bishop is living a quiet existence in the town of Killington, Vermont. It’s Halloween, and her community has no idea that she’s a real-deal witch, descended from witches from Salem, Massachusetts. She feels lonely and isolated, so she decides to finally get into the holiday spirit by putting out high-quality candy and hanging decorations to attract visitors. However, when trick-or-treaters do arrive, they don’t take the candy, but instead egg Bridgett and her house, fleeing and laughing as she tries to gather herself up from the floor. Hurt and enraged, Bridgett treats the next trick-or-treater very differently, snatching the solitary young boy out of the darkness. Meanwhile, Count Dracula and his companion, Aoife, live secretly in the morgue at the local St. Mary’s hospital, and are assisted in their day-to-day lives by Noah and Connor, a couple who own a local rare bookstore. The pair even save Dracula and Aoife from the pitchforks of an angry mob through a clever bit of espionage. The town offers an array of sinister knowledge and objects which Bridgett can use to carry out her mission of revenge, as she soon turns to none other than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for “prescriptions” before breaking into the local museum to reanimate the mummy of Anubis, among other Egyptian gods. As the town devolves into fear and panic, it seems clear that the local flock of monsters will soon rule the roost.

DeGuire has selected the perfect locale for an autumnal holiday tale, and he knows how to capture its famous pastoral appeal with a hint of spookiness: “The swooping mass of swarming birds morphed into graceful shapes at first, but then the images became more sinister and familiar. A hideous skeletal face, a jack-o-lantern, and a ghoul that would give Edvard Munch pause.” There’s quite a bit going on in these pages, as disparate legends and mythologies overlap and collide in rapid succession; not only witches and vampires, but also werewolves and even Frankenstein’s monster make appearances, all coming together in a sort of royal rumble of malevolent fictional figures. Although this arrangement requires significant suspension of disbelief from readers, it is likely, given it squarely falls within the horror genre, that most of the intended audience will enjoy seeing the likes of Count Dracula and a New England witch on the same page. There are some times when DeGuire moves a bit too quickly from character to character without giving readers time to properly settle in; this is especially true in the case of Bridgett, whose character might have benefited from a bit more pathos and introspection. Still, the author’s approach results in a pace that keeps the pages turning at a satisfying clip, and readers are apt to wing their way through to the end.

A creepy and often exciting novel featuring timeless legends and lore in small-town America.