DRACULA IS A PAIN IN THE NECK

Another shiver-borrowing title like Levy's Frankenstein Moved in on the Fourth Floor (1979), this one spooks up a fairly slight story of mysterious moans and joke-butt miseries at summer camp--where Robert, the younger brother of the Frankenstein story, is teased for bringing along his Dracula doll and his baby pillow. Then the campers are disturbed at night by mysterious moans; food disappears from the kitchen; and the campers, mistaking the chicken-pox scars on Robert's neck for tooth marks, begin to suspect that he's actually a vampire. When Robert and brother Sam, who's at the same camp, sneak out at night to confront the real culprit, they are frightened by a figure in a cape. . . but they become heroes the next night when they and fellow-camper Jared capture the ""monsters,"" an overweight counselor and the camp cook. ""Dracula does not exist,"" confesses the counselor at a camp-fire assembly. ""Cookie and I have a confession to make. For the past several nights we have been pretending we were Dracula so we could take extra portions of food without anyone noticing. At first I thought it would be a harmless prank, but then I realized that poor Robert Bamford was getting all the blame."" Readers lured by the fun-scary title and cover are likely to be let down by the flat solution, if not by the perfunctory mystery--but tame as they are, all the non-serious shivers and Dracula puns will probably keep the pages turning.