SOURCE: “Ghoulish Giggles.” Times Literary Supplement (11 May 1973): 517.

In the following review, the anonymous critic finds The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion disappointing.

Published seventy-six years ago and continuously in print ever since, Dracula is beginning to exhibit qualities of survival similar to those of such earlier romantic fictions as The Monk and Frankenstein; the main difference being that while Lewis's and Mary Shelley's books appeared in the early years of the Romantic Revival, Bram Stoker's coincided with Victoria's second jubilee. It was, in short, right from the start a story that both in its subject-matter and its narrative-manner harked back to earlier models, most of all perhaps to those provided by Wilkie Collins.

Because of the staying-power of this work, it is only fitting that Charles Osborne should have had the idea of resuscitating these ten further pieces of Abraham Stoker's writing [in The Bram Stoker Bedside Companion]. Frankly...