Dracula Lives
by Robert Ryan
Published: May 30th, 2016
Genre: Horror
Recommended Age: 12+
Where
is the line between movies and real life? Perhaps there isn’t one.
In Dracula
Lives, Amazon bestselling author Robert Ryan once again takes us where no
one should ever go.
Deep
in the wilds of New England, a man who worked on the 1931 Dracula still
lives. Haunted by the experience ever since, he has built an exact replica of
Castle Dracula and become obsessed with bringing the movie vampire to life. But
when one sets out to make monsters, there are risks—as Adam Quinn is about to
find out. A lifelong fan of Dracula and the classic horror films from
Universal Studios, he is invited to the castle. It’s a horror lover’s dream:
the chance to find out what it was like to work with Bela Lugosi, Dwight Frye,
director Tod Browning, and all the others. But dreams can turn into nightmares…
The
castle awaits. Enter freely and of your own free will.
Read FREE with Kindle Unlimited!
The
severed hand hitched its way up the stairs in its relentless drive to kill the
person it was directed to kill.
The hand
was not human. It was a webbed humanoid thing. Long, scaly fingers with
inch-long, needle-sharp claws deftly hooked into the carpet covering the
stairs, again and again, until the hand flopped onto the landing. It scuttled
across the Persian rug to the closed wooden door of the bedchamber. Catlike,
the hand used its claws to dig into the wood and skitter up the door. The
instant it reached the top, it released its grip and began falling. With a
precision that spoke of long practice, it broke its fall by grabbing the
handle. The maneuver turned the handle and jostled the door open a crack.
The hand
dropped noiselessly onto the rug. Righting itself, it squeezed through the
crack and scrabbled across the floor as though possessed. Clamping onto the
wooden bedpost of the canopied four-poster, it wriggled up and flopped onto the
bed.
The
sleeper lay face up, under a satin sheet pulled up to just below the neck.
A few
feet away, a tall man dressed in black stood beside the bed, watching the scene
unfold through a pair of oversized goggles. A large glove on his right hand
mimicked the movements of the beast with five fingers.
The hand
clawed its way across the sheet with deadly purpose. Seconds later, it reached
the exposed neck and clamped down.
The
sleeper’s eyes shot open.
The tall
man dropped his gloved hand to his side. “Cut!” he said.
The hand
from some alien world squeezed harder.
The
sleeper’s eyes widened in alarm.
“Cut, I
said!” The tall man yanked off the glove.
The
sleeper struggled to pull the hand off, moaning in pain as the tugging only
made the maniacal thing tighten its grip.
After an
intense battle the tall man managed to pry the hand loose and toss it to the
floor. Its fingers twitched erratically for a few seconds, then made a wobbly
effort to crawl back to the bedpost. As the man bent to grab it, the hand fell
over on its back and lay still.
Looking
back at the sleeper, the man saw spots of red where some of the claws had
pierced the flesh.
Annoyed,
the tall man stared at his glove. “We shall have to test it again. All must be
in readiness for our guest. There will be no time for retakes.”
Mr. Ryan was
born and raised in the D.C. where tourists don’t go—a land of soul food and
Scrapple.
He lived
directly behind the neighborhood movie theater, and his mother took him to
everything from the time he was barely out of diapers. When he reached the ripe
old age of about six, he couldn’t wait for the Saturday creature features.
Atomic mutants running amok, the monsters of Ray Harryhausen, Roger Corman’s
Poe films, and the unabashed frightfests of William Castle were among the early
influences that warped his writer’s muse into a breeding ground for—to borrow a
line from Morbius in Forbidden Planet—his “Monsters from the Id.”
In Castle’s
The Tingler, when Vincent Price told us all to scream because the Tingler was
loose in the theater, you better believe he screamed. On the literary front he
soon discovered Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch, among others,
and followed the trail they blazed into the “ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.”
It seems he
has always been drawn to scary stories.
There
is a tour wide giveaway. Prizes include the following:
If
US, winner will receive a Kindle Fire. If International, winner gets a $50 Amazon
Gift Card
Giveaway
is International.
Ends
July 11th at 11:59PM EDT
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