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I went into this knowing practically nothing about the story. I've never seen the movie (ANY movie), had never read the book, and only knew what I'd been able to glean from memes and other pop-culture references.

It was pretty good. I enjoyed the forward too, which made multiple references to how the book differs from the movie, and although I'd not seen the movie, I was familiar enough with things like the red slippers and the "there's no place like home" quote. Neither of which appear in the book.

It's a fine story and I enjoyed it. One thing that I'm sure the author didn't expect to stick with me, but it did because of current sensibilities, is how the singular genderless pronoun ("they" today) used to be "he". Even when explicitly referencing a hypothetical female, the author uses "he" -- It was something along the lines of, "If a boy or girl wanted to do xyz, then he would have to...."

Clearly, there used to be nothing strange about using "he" to refer to a singular person of any gender. I find that... interesting, because even I have adopted "they" for that purpose in my everyday speech.

One negative is that the edition I read, which I got from Everand, had some bad editing in it. I don't know if some of those issues were in the original printing, but at least some of them were clearly issues caused by bad OCR. Why can't people just proofread?

But don't let that detract from your enjoyment of the story. Once again, it's really good. It feels like a piece of history, a really nostalgic walk down memory lane, that puts me in mind of many of the children's stories I read as a child. It gave me the warm fuzzies!

As a self-confessed vampire prude (I developed most of my beliefs about vampires from the old Ravenloft sourcebooks), I'm always nervous to read a different take on the creatures of the night. I'm afraid that if something is too different to the canon I have in my head, I'll get upset. And to be honest, that's happened in the past.

But this... this book was GOOD! It's familiar enough that it doesn't feel like a betrayal of everything I hold dear about vampires, but at the same time it's a different take. Some things are different to what you may have grown up believing, but that doesn't offend you because it's all internally consistent, and it makes perfect sense why they're are different.

It's a good story too, set in late 1800s England, Italy, and France (although it was published in 1982).

I don't know if I'd call this the BEST vampire story I've ever read, but it's up there. If you're a fan of the genre, I highly recommend it.