Tuesday, October 16, 2012

"Frankenstein Meets Dracula" by Donald E Glut

Yesterday, m'colleague Web of Evil presented me with two fine volumes purloined from a second-hand bookshop. The first was Doctor Who: Nightshade by Mark Gatiss, now 20 years old and which I have previously blogged about.

The other volume is The New Adventures of Frankenstein: No. 4 Frankenstein Meets Dracula by Donald E Glut (who later novelised The Empire Strikes Back), published by New English Library in December 1977. The cover seems to show Boris Karloff's Frankenstein meeting, er, Mel Brooks' Dracula:


It's a slim bit of shlocky horror - 140 pages for 80p - but a joy to behold. I've only flipped through it, thrilled by the adverts at the back for the most intriguing titles:


And look at the books listed under "General":


Sadly (given the three books before it), The Long Banana Skin turns out to be an autobiography of a Goon. So I flipped back through the novel looking for a random page which might give a flavour of the story. The words "Burt Winslow's Journal" caught my eye - there's surely no more spine-tingling name in all of horror - and the prose that followed is a pretty damn perfect:


6 comments:

  1. Weirdest of all?

    He's Donald F. Glut, not Donald E.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_F._Glut


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  2. Weird. It's definitely an E on the book, but an F on his website, where the list of his novels includes this one: http://www.donaldfglut.com/credits.html

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  4. I've got the first two or three in NEL somewhere. Great pulp books, as I recall.

    You know Bill Cunningham's reprinting them, right?

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  5. k, but an F on his website, where the list of his novels in

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  6. Wow, this book certainly brings back fond memories of December 1977, when I bought it, as I did all the previous Glut Frankenstein novels. They were brilliant, and it was especially exciting to see a book come out featuring not one but TWO of my favourite movie monsters, names Frankenstein and Dracula!

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