Dracula!
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Puffin Crossovers Dracula! |
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| Written by | Paul Magrs |  |
| Published | 2025 |
| Synopsis: On what they hope is going to be a holiday, the Doctor and his companions arrive in a quiet, unassuming seaside town called Whitby. The terrible significance of the place evades them, until they happen upon a theatre production that captivates their attention. Suddenly, murders are occurring left, right and centre, 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. |
Sink Your Teeth Into This! by Matthew Kresal 16/4/26
As a series, Doctor Who is no stranger to riffs and adaptations. Stories such as The Brain of Morbius, which jumped off of Mary Shelly's Frankenstein or Christmas specials that brought in elements of Charles Dickens or C.S. Lewis in Modern Who, to name but a handful of examples. Puffin has spent the last few years having various authors following suit in a more explicit fashion with TARDIS crews from throughout the series history popping up in new versions of literary classics. The latest (and potentially final) entry in the range is such a natural fit that one's surprised it didn't happen much sooner: Dracula! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the title!).
Paul Magrs, who has a long list of Who writing credits behind him in various media and penned previous books in this same Puffin range, has an interesting premise to play with. Bram Stoker's novel, after all, has become a classic, with countless adaptations and crossovers. In doing this Doctor Who version, Magrs could have taken a couple of different approaches that those penning encounters between the Count and Sherlock Holmes have done in the past. The first is, like Loren D. Estleman with Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula, is to drop the Doctor and their companions into Stoker's novel between scenes and acting as unseen influences upon the novel's events. The other, which David Stuart Davies did with The Tangled Skein (itself adapted by Big Finish with modern voice of the Daleks Nicholas Brigg as Holmes), is to drop the vampire into another franchise to see how the characters react to his presence. Which approach did Magrs take here?
A path between them. One which sees the appearance of characters and elements from Stoker's novel as part of the novel (notably Van Helsing and the Gothic parts of the town of Whitby) mixed in with at least some version of the novel's events having occurred in-universe a decade before. Magrs also keeps in mind the show's own encounters with and mythology around the creatures of the night, incorporating it as part of the narrative, something that allows him to also do his own spin on Stoker's novel. It's an interesting path to take, one that simultaneously pays tribute to the novel and its adaptations but not being slavish to it, allowing this to stand on its own.
There's also the TARDIS crew appearing in the novel. The original 1963-4 TARDIS team is iconic, but perhaps surprising to appear in what is (notionally at least) a series aimed at young adult readers. How many tweens are watching 1960s Doctor Who is anyone's guess! Magrs's use of them here, for this longtime fan of the series at least, works splendidly. Everyone has something to contribute to the narrative and often gets paired off with another character for portions of it (The Doctor with Van Helsing; Susan with Van Helsing's nephew, Bernard; and Barbara with a stranger she encounters later on in the novel). In proper sixties fashion, Ian vanishes for the equivalent of a TV episode, as if to allow the late William Russell a week off! Though, to Magrs credit, he finds a compelling reason in-story for why that would take place. Each of them feels present and correct, including scenes that feel tailor made to Hartnell's Doctor toward the novel's end. It's an impeccable pastiche of the first TARDIS crew and a highlight of Dracula! as a fun read.
Fun, but not perfect. Being aimed at a young adult audience does mean that there's only so far that the actual horror can be depicted on the page, which can be frustrating when you're reading a riff on a classic horror novel. Magrs does well for the most part, but the events at the novel's climax are perhaps undermined by how little the novel can show what's happening. The reveal of the novel's villain and the final showdown is rather rushed, realizations and connections only made in the literary equivalent of a split second before its back to action. It's a shame, because the eventual villain and their connection to the infamous Count are intriguing, but not where Magrs can develop them to their full effectiveness. Something that might have taken a good read and made something that little bit more.
Even so, Dracula! offers up a Doctor Who crossover of sorts that you didn't know you needed until you read it. One that neatly builds a version of Stoker's novel into the show's universe alongside a first-rate pastiche of the original Classic Who TARDIS crew. Not to mention a good read that not only the target audience but longtime grown-up fans of Doctor Who can sink their teeth into.