So it turns out there's a novelization of Werner Herzog's 1979 film based on F.W. Murnau's 1929 film loosely based on Dracula. Both of those movies are brilliant, and it's no surprise that the book isn't, since novelizations are produced for strictly commercial reasons—and this particular movie has fairly little in the way of dialogue or plot, it's all about the tone and the performances, so any attempt to pad it out to book length can't help looking like just that: padding. No one really wanted to make this book, and probably few people wanted to read it.

However, there are plenty of writers who could've approached this gig as a straightforward exercise in "Describe what happens in the movie, and make up some extra stuff of the same kind, plus maybe some things the director didn't have the budget for." Paul Monette doesn't exactly do that. There's certainly plenty of excess verbiage in a faux-19th-century style, as he describes this German town and various details of the characters' backgrounds that don't really matter but make it seem more like a novel; yet you get the sense that there's a point of view there, and every so often a genuinely good and surprising sentence will show up, and it's an effort he wasn't required to make, he just felt a little more inspired right then. My favorite of these is when Lucy Harker (the most pure-hearted woman in the world) decides she's not at any risk of losing her soul, because to be a vampire you need "a cast of mind she simply didn't possess—a sense of secrecy and guilt, of longing without a name, of terror to live in time." There are things going on in that ambiguous and allusive sentence that are both perfectly appropriate for the story and also clearly the work of a queer writer who had been closeted until just a few years earlier. At such times you can see the author briefly imagining what his own supernatural novel might be like, if he wrote one.

While he clearly hasn't seen the film—these books are usually based on early script drafts, and the plot is the same in this case, but this more ferocious characterization of Dracula has nothing in common with Klaus Kinski's strikingly sad performance—Monette gets at some of the same themes that I think Herzog had in mind, so there's some imagery about nature being out of balance, and some dry satire of the conformist townspeople, and a clear sense that what really seals Jonathan Harker's fate is just wanting a little more money. So anyone expecting an action-packed horror story with some kind of romance angle (which, by the way, the back cover copy tries to play up by totally giving away the ending) will be confused and disappointed, which is also true of the film, and in that sense mission accomplished! Monette also seems to know the Murnau film and throws in some nice details from that, like how Dracula's handwriting is just a bunch of unintelligible symbols; or maybe Herzog had that in the script and cut it, I don't know.

I haven't read Monette's later work, the stuff he's known for, which only started after his partner's death and his own illness. Apparently he didn't like any of his earlier books, not the more personal novels and I'm sure not the four novelizations he wrote for 20th Century Fox and Universal: this, and Scarface, and the SF/action Schwarzenegger vehicle Predator (read this review), and the cop comedy Midnight Run—all totally unsuited to [my impression of] his style and concerns, but I presume the main criteria for authors of these things are "Tells a story, doesn't need a lot of copyediting, turns in the job on time." I can't imagine how he would've approached Nosferatu—with its apocalyptic scenes of a community being destroyed by a semi-supernatural plague, presided over by an ancient demented aristocrat and the mad businessman who serves him—if he'd written it a few years later in the time of AIDS and Reaganism. But presumably this book helped him to pay the rent in 1979 and I'm fine with that. ( )

The language was a little flowery for my taste, but it was still very, very good. ( )