The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula - Softcover

Anscombe, Dr. Roderick

3.55

833 ratings by Goodreads

9780312357665: The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312357664 ISBN 13: 9780312357665

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2006

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Paris, 1866---A young Hungarian medical student with the arresting last name of Dracula arrives at Salp�tri�re Hospital to further his education. There, on his first day, he witnesses a young and beautiful patient submit herself to hypnosis. He becomes obsessed with Stacia, and the affair moves from tender passion to a fit of jealous rage, which ends with a shocking moment of communion.
Dracula flees back to Hungary, there assuming his dead brother's title of "Count." During the following decades, other young beauties capture the count's twisted imagination, and he spirals deeper and deeper into the desire for ultimate possession, while ministering to the sick during his daytime existence.
Written as a journal, this erotic and chilling tale reveals Dracula as an educated man with serious moral flaws---unable to escape his fantasies and reconcile his inner dichotomy, that of a doctor who is bound by oath to help and mend, and an unstoppable killer feeding on his victims' blood.

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About the Author:

Roderick Anscombe is a forensic psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at Harvard Medical School. Throughout his career, he has treated the most violent and psychotic patients in Massachusetts, including serial killers, stalkers, and the criminally insane. In addition to his fiction, Dr. Anscombe has published articles in scholarly journals on psychotherapy and the unconscious. He is the author of The Interview Room and lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Dracula's diary reveals a complex, all-too-human character in this lush, entertaining, and generally convincing first novel by an Oxford-trained psychiatrist. Young Laszlo Dracula, second son of a deceased Hungarian nobleman, dreams of devoting his life to the scientific study of the human mind. Sent to Paris in 1866 to become a doctor, 23-year- old Laszlo assists by day at the infamous SalpˆtriŠre Hospital while socializing by night with the wealthy friends of his cousin, Nichole. Sinister but clever man-about-town Lothar von Pick soon takes it upon himself to introduce Laszlo to a top tailor and a gentlemen's brothel--where he is deflowered by an unbalanced young woman he tends at the sanitarium. Repelled by his unethical behavior yet unable to restrain himself, Laszlo makes a mistress of this vulnerable patient, until a fit of jealousy causes him to ``accidentally'' cut her throat and flee Paris to avoid a murder charge. Back in the castle, Laszlo discovers that his older brother has died; he assumes the count's title, responsibilities, and even his wife. A 20-year period of isolation and sexual abstinence follows, until Laszlo again feels the beast within him begin to emerge. Soon, another mistress is murdered in a fit of jealousy, a prostitute is killed during a late-night drinking binge, and, finally, the local village maidens begin disappearing one by one. Rumors of vampires fly through the town as each corpse is found more viciously ravished than the one before--and as Count Dracula, now middle-aged and fully aware of the doom that awaits him, hurtles ever-faster down the slope of sin and degradation. Anscombe's characters are richly drawn, and his pseudo- Victorian prose is a pleasure to read--though once we understand where poor Laszlo is headed, the suspense inevitably begins to falter. (Literary Guild featured alternate; $150,000 ad/promo; author tour) -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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