HOLIDAY SPIRIT BOOK THREE

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.