Books: Doctor Who: Dracula! By Paul Magrs (2025)

“On what they hope is going to be a holiday, the Doctor and his companions arrive in a quiet, unassuming seaside town called Whitby, a civil parish in the English county of North Yorkshire. The terrible significance of the place evades them, until they happen upon a theater production that captivates their attention: Dracula! Suddenly, murders are occurring left, right and center, each victim with trademark puncture wounds on their neck. Ian is soon missing, and a town shrouded in myth and legend is beginning to live up to its name. Clearly there is a Dracula at large. But the TARDIS team quickly realizes: you can never trust a vampire.”  

The next Puffin Book that has the Doctor crossing-over with public domain characters continues with Dracula! There is more to this tale than meets the eye and longtime fans, who can read between the lines, will be treated to more than just the TARDIS crew interacting with a “supposedly” fictional character. It’s entertaining and fun and moves along at a good pace. I would be remiss in not pointing out that it does have massive bags of atmosphere, and uses the Bram Stoker tale story as a jumping-off point, rather than as a straightforward riff on a familiar tale. Set sometime during the first season of the classic series, Magrs does something unusual here, by having the vampire focus on Ian instead of –what generally happens in this genre- Barbara or Susan. A great twist. 

Some might find the supernatural elements in this science fiction series a bit odd, but here it actually fits in pretty well, as DOCTOR WHO has had a long association with the vampire lore dating back to STATE OF DECAY, a 4^th Doctor adventure from the Classic series. It was there that we learned that the Time Lords, during the earliest days of their time travel experiments, accidentally released the Great Vampires from another dimension into our dimension and how they spread throughout the galaxy, which is why almost every planet the Doctor has traveled to has some lore about creatures of the night.   

There is also a lot of real life history attached to it to this tale, though Magrs does not go too deep here. In some sense, this tale could whet the appetite of some young reader into looking at the real-life history of the origins of Dracula and writer Bram Stoker. 

A few notes: 

Paul Magrs was born and raised in Jarrow, which is little less than hour and half north from Whitby, but he has set his Brenda and Effie Mysteries supernatural series in Whitby. Those novels often incorporate elements of the town's Gothic atmosphere and its connection to Bram Stoker and Dracula, making Whitby a central character in those stories. Also, this book contains a character named Kristoff Alucard (a anagram of Dracula), who was created for his Iris Widlthyme character, a self-styled "transtemporal adventuress" of contentious origin who travels the multiverse in an age-old London double-decker bus, commonly known as Celestial Omnibus. She often resembled various television and film actresses throughout her many paradoxical incarnations. She met the Third Doctor in Extended Universe title Verdigris, also written by Magrs.

Books: The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6) by Dan Brown (2025)

“Accompanying celebrated academic, Katherine Solomon, to a lecture she’s been invited to give in Prague, Robert Langdon’s world spirals out of control when she disappears without trace from their hotel room. Far from home and well out of his comfort zone, Langdon must pit his wits against forces unknown to recover the woman he loves. But Prague is an old and dangerous city, steeped in folklore and mystery. For over two thousand years, the tides of history have washed back and forth over it, leaving behind echoes of everything that has gone before. Little can Langdon know that he is being stalked by a specter from that dark past. He must use all of his arcane knowledge to decipher the world around him before he too is consumed by the rings of treachery and deception that have swallowed Katherine. Against a backdrop of vast castles, towering churches, graveyards buried twelve deep and labyrinthine underground passages, Langdon must navigate a shadow city hiding in plain sight, a city which has successfully kept its secrets for centuries and will not readily deliver them. This is a battlefield unlike any he has previously experienced, one on which he must fight not for his only life, but for the future of humanity itself.” 

After an 8-year hiatus, Dan Brown returns with the sixth novel featuring Robert Langdon. As with the previous five, this one features his sometimes-difficult to read pulpy prose style, in a book that could be easily turned into a screenplay. However, the endless monologue-like TED Talks and the frequent use of the words “brilliant” and “stunning” would need to be altered. 

Brown sets up another “what if” scenario that borrows heavily from the real world study of neuroscience and turns it into some sort metaphor on hidden realities. He uses real people and locations, including delving into the Project Stargate (which involved the CIA and the military, and explored the potential use of extrasensory perception {ESP} and remote viewing for intelligence gathering during the Cold War) and other secret CIA projects that tip this novel more into science fiction, and try to make these experiments sound plausible. 

There is some interesting stuff here, though, including the parts about the subconscious mind and what happens to human consciousness after death. That was neat reading, because it is the undiscovered country, as Shakespeare once said, and it haunts everyone. However, much of the metaphysics that this book tries to WOW you with is not fully explained; it seems mostly there to force the reader into doing his or her own investigations. 

Like a broken record with a lot of today’s writers, at 677 pages, it’s overlong and it got annoying that was mostly due to Brown’s choice of reminding the reader of the plot of the book again and again (also the TED Talks). It’s not a total bloated mess, by far, and these books are fun (I’ve read them all and generally have the same opinion on them), but the pacing is a bit off here from the previous books. And I sometimes think Brown takes himself too seriously. I think he might actually believe in what he writes – no matter how wild the idea.