Rosamund Matilda Renfield

A fan page for all things Dracula and Renfield, of course!

[renfield-antics]

The Monster, the Mirror, the Lover: Dracula, My Love

Syrie James’s Dracula, My Love: The Secret Journals of Mina Harker takes one of literature’s most tightly sealed Gothic stories and pries it open with trembling hands and a yearning heart. What if the great vampire was not only a figure of terror — but of tragic allure? What if Mina’s silence in Stoker’s novel wasn’t fear, but something deeper, something forbidden?

This book answers that question with ink, blood, and aching beauty. Told through Mina’s secret diaries, it reimagines her not as a passive victim but as a woman torn between two worlds: the safe, moral light of Victorian order and the dark, intoxicating pull of Dracula’s love.

James writes with the pulse of romance but never abandons the Gothic shadow. Her prose is lush and intimate, full of candlelit longing and unspoken danger. You can almost feel the weight of Mina’s quill as she writes by moonlight — half in confession, half in surrender. The Count is no longer just a monster; he’s a fallen angel, the embodiment of everything she’s told herself to fear.

What makes this retelling compelling is how it reframes desire as rebellion. Mina’s love is not a weakness but a storm — a refusal to be tamed by her time, her gender, or her God. And yet, the tragedy remains. The story keeps its sharp fangs even as it sighs with romance.

There’s a quiet power in seeing Mina claim her narrative. Where Stoker silenced her, James lets her whisper, shout, and bleed her truth across the page. The result feels like reading the shadow version of Dracula — one where love and damnation share the same heartbeat.

Dracula, My Love isn’t about redemption. It’s about choice — the kind that burns, the kind that costs you everything. It’s for those who’ve ever looked at the monster and seen themselves reflected back.

[renfield-antics]

Stake Me With Laughter: Revisiting Dracula: Dead and Loving It

Sometimes horror needs to take itself less seriously — and Dracula: Dead and Loving It does just that, in the most gloriously ridiculous way possible. Directed by Mel Brooks, the master of parody, this 1995 comedy takes Bram Stoker’s Gothic masterpiece, throws open the coffin lid, and lets in a flood of slapstick sunlight.

Leslie Nielsen’s Count Dracula isn’t the seductive aristocrat of Lugosi or the tragic monster of Coppola — he’s a charming disaster. Every gesture is dramatic, every bite a mess, and yet he owns the absurdity. Nielsen gives us a Dracula who is utterly clueless about his own campness, and that’s the joke that keeps biting back.

Mel Brooks (as Van Helsing) leans fully into the chaos, delivering lines with that signature wink that reminds you: yes, this is ridiculous, and yes, that’s the point. It’s Gothic excess meets Looney Tunes, all set inside crumbling castles and misty graveyards that look almost too perfect to parody.

There’s also something sweet about how it all plays out — a love letter to the old Universal horror films, with just enough affection to make the mockery feel warm. You can tell Brooks loves the source material even as he’s laughing at it.

And let’s not forget: Peter MacNicol’s Renfield. Possibly one of the most chaotic and delightful takes on the character — twitching, wild-eyed, and somehow both pitiable and hilarious. He’s the film’s unsung MVP, a perfect balance between madness and comic timing. You can see echoes of his performance in later Renfields across pop culture — the nervous devotion, the grotesque humor. He’s proof that even in a parody, Renfield steals the show.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It isn’t scary — it’s gleefully undead. It reminds us that the vampire myth can handle being poked, prodded, and even tickled. After all, immortality is a long time to be serious.

[renfield-antics]

A New Dawn for the Undead: Powers of Darkness Unearthed

Powers of Darkness isn’t a retelling of Dracula — it’s a fever dream wearing Dracula’s skin. Reading it feels like opening a familiar coffin and finding someone else’s corpse inside: paler, sharper, more ancient. This lost version, originally serialized in Iceland in 1900, claims to be a translation of Stoker’s novel — but it’s really something stranger, hungrier, and far more unholy.

Here, Count Dracula is not merely a creature of appetite; he is the high priest of a secret cult, a messiah of blood whose power stretches beyond the Carpathians. The castle is no longer just haunted — it’s alive with whispering rituals, strange visitors, and walls that seem to pulse with conspiracy. Gone is much of Stoker’s second half; instead, Powers of Darkness lingers in the dark heart of the Count’s domain, obsessed with power, philosophy, and possession.

Reading it, you realize this version of Dracula isn’t satisfied with feeding on victims — he wants to rebuild the world in his own image. He’s aristocratic evil in its purest form: not just a monster but a metaphor for control, elitism, and the rot beneath society’s grace. The politics of it are sharper than in Stoker’s text; the sensuality, more feral; the atmosphere, heavier — thick as incense and grave-dust.

What’s most fascinating is how Powers of Darkness reflects on the myth itself. The story feels less Victorian and more apocalyptic. It’s a Dracula that doesn’t hide in the shadows — he speaks openly of the new order he will create, of humanity’s weakness and the divinity of the predator. It’s both thrilling and unsettling to read this vision of Dracula as prophet, not parasite.

Even the prose feels different — leaner, rawer, more obsessed with bodily detail and moral corruption. The women here are spectral, the men desperate, and Dracula stands like a statue of ancient pride among them all. It’s a text that makes you question: was this the story Stoker wanted to tell, or one that escaped from his imagination like a shadow with its own will?

Powers of Darkness is a relic, yes — but one that breathes. It reminds us that myths are not static. They twist, they infect, they rewrite themselves when no one is looking. This is Dracula before he was polished by cinema, before the cape, before the charm — this is the raw hunger underneath the legend.

If Dracula is the candlelight horror of repression, Powers of Darkness is the flame itself, burning through restraint until all that’s left is revelation and ruin.

“He speaks not for the dead, but for the future that has already begun.”

[renfield-antics]

Where the Night Becomes Your Prison

Reading Dracula: Endless Night feels like walking naked through a storm at midnight — cold rain slicing at your skin, thunder rumbling in your chest, and every shadow whispering that the night has teeth. Thomas Burchfield doesn’t just retell the Dracula story; he drags it into its darkest corners, makes the monster monstrous again — a “Superman of Evil,” as the text teases, wielding freedom and power like weapons.

Dracula here is not content with lurking in castles or draining blood in secret. He is conqueror, storm-bring­er, ruler of a dream world twisted by his will. Burchfield keeps close to Stoker’s original, yes, but he isn’t afraid to add new coils of horror, new reflections of the human souls who stand against Dracula. They aren’t clean heroes; each one carries sin, temptation, and fear. When they stare into Dracula’s visage, the real question isn’t whether Dracula will destroy them — it’s whether they will lose themselves in the mirror first.

The landscapes are drawn with grand strokes of dread: from Transylvanian wilds to fog-washed Victorian cliffs, the scenery isn’t just background. It’s a character in its own right, pulling at your ankles, breathing cold on your neck, making every safe doorstep feel like a trap. The prose leans dark and electric. When Dracula moves, when he whispers, you can feel the change in the room’s air — you can smell the rot beneath the velvet.

What makes Endless Night especially haunting is how power and horror intertwine. Dracula is seductive. He promises absolution through eternal night, and in that promise you hear what the characters want: escape, significance, release. But you also hear the cost: identity, morality, humanity. There’s a romance here — to darkness, to surrender — but it’s a contract written in bone.

If the novel has weaknesses, they lie in moments when its ambition strains the tether to empathy. Some characters feel more like shadows of potential than full souls, and scenes intended for dread occasionally veer into spectacle. But maybe that’s part of the point: spectacle is part of the vampire myth. Every flicker of horror, every taste of terror, matters more when you know it’s built on both beauty and decay.

Dracula: Endless Night is not a comfort read. It’s not a retelling for the faint of heart. But it is a reward for those who love the myth of Dracula in all its monstrous glory — for those who believe that underneath every legend lies a darkness we long to touch.

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Dracula (1931) — The Birth of an Eternal Shadow

There’s something almost reverent about watching Dracula (1931) — like standing at the threshold of cinematic horror itself. It’s not just a film; it’s the moment the monster learned to speak. Tod Browning’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s tale may move at the pace of a dream, but it still feels like a ritual — the summoning of Count Dracula from the pages of legend into the flickering light of film.

Bela Lugosi’s Count doesn’t snarl or stalk. He glides. Every movement is deliberate, every word delivered like a spell. His accent — that elegant, deliberate cadence — became the vampire’s heartbeat for nearly a century. He doesn’t need fangs to terrify; he seduces through silence. The way he says “I never drink… wine” feels less like a line and more like an invitation to damnation. Lugosi’s Dracula is not just undead — he’s enchanted, and you fall under that enchantment willingly.

And then there’s Renfield — Dwight Frye’s manic brilliance bursting through the shadows. Before Lugosi even arrives, Frye gives us the most unforgettable portrayal of madness ever seen in early horror. His wild eyes, that shrill, broken laughter, the way he whispers to invisible creatures — it all defines the archetype of the doomed servant. Every Renfield that came after, from stage to screen, from satire to tragedy, still borrows something from Frye’s trembling devotion. His performance isn’t just supporting; it’s haunting. He made Renfield the true echo of Dracula — a reflection of the Count’s hunger trapped inside a mortal frame.

Visually, the film feels like wandering through a cathedral of cobwebs. The absence of music (so striking for modern audiences) makes every creak, every bat’s flutter, echo like a whispered prayer. The sets are drenched in shadow — gothic staircases, mist curling like smoke around tombstones, candles trembling in the dark. There’s beauty here, but it’s the kind that smells faintly of decay.

Of course, Dracula (1931) is a relic of early horror, and it shows its age. The pacing lingers, the dialogue can stumble, and certain scenes feel more theatrical than cinematic. But that’s part of its spell. You’re not watching a story unfold — you’re witnessing an incantation, one that shaped how generations would dream of vampires to come. Every modern Dracula, from Christopher Lee to Claes Bang, walks in Lugosi’s shadow — and every mad disciple whispers with Frye’s cracked voice.

What strikes me most, rewatching it now, is how lonely this Dracula feels. Behind the velvet cloak and cold poise, there’s a sense of eternal isolation. He’s not a monster chasing blood; he’s a ghost chasing connection. Mina’s pulse, the candlelight, the promise of life — all just brief flickers in his endless night. Lugosi’s eyes carry that sadness, that strange nobility of the damned.

Dracula (1931) is the film that taught the world how to fear beauty — and how to love the monster. It’s creaky, slow, and utterly mesmerizing. The Count may have been born in ink, but it was in this film that he learned to breathe — and his breath still chills the room.

"Listen to them — children of the night. What music they make."

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The Devotion That Devoured Him

There’s something magnetic about the mad, isn’t there? About the ones who see the world slant, who reach out for something divine and find only blood. Renfield: A Tale of Madness takes that fragile, haunted man from the shadows of Dracula and lets him finally speak — not as a footnote to another’s immortality, but as a soul collapsing under its own visions.

The story unfolds within the asylum walls, where Renfield claws through sanity like it’s another locked door. The writing weaves a voice that’s both pitiful and prophetic, letting us drift inside Renfield’s mind as it spirals between worship and despair. This is a man who believes he has glimpsed God through Dracula — and that God drinks blood. Every word trembles with that delusion, that ecstasy. It’s not horror in the jump-scare sense; it’s the slow, aching kind, the one that stains your thoughts long after the page closes.

What makes this adaptation so striking is its devotion to Renfield’s point of view. We see the events of Dracula refracted through his fevered logic, but twisted through the lens of a man too far gone to tell prayer from hunger. Dracula himself is less a villain here and more an idea, a looming shape that Renfield loves and fears with equal intensity. And that’s what makes it so tragic — the sense that Renfield understands something the others never will, but at a price no sane mind could bear.

The art carries the story with a beautiful sense of restraint. Rendered in stark black and white, it feels like the echo of a nightmare scribbled in candlelight. Every panel bleeds with Gothic melancholy — the stone corridors, the cold moonlight, the endless eyes in the dark. It’s a classic style, unhurried and stylish, perfectly echoing the voice of the damned. You can almost hear the scratching of flies beneath the ink.

Renfield has always been one of the most underrated figures in Dracula’s mythos — the human reflection of the monster’s hunger, the servant who mirrors his master too closely. This book doesn’t try to redeem him. It lets him rot in his own worship, whispering to the flies and the voices that promise him salvation. But it gives him the dignity of being seen. It gives madness its voice.

Renfield: A Tale of Madness isn’t a comfortable read. It’s unsettling, raw, and sometimes uneven. But that’s part of its charm. It captures the trembling line between devotion and decay, and it leaves you wondering who’s really cursed — the vampire who cannot die, or the man who believed in him too deeply.

It’s a dark hymn, sung through broken teeth — and it’s beautiful.

[renfield-antics]

Rats, Madness, and Forgotten Souls

The Inferno Doll's Renfield is a visceral journey into the fractured mind of Bram Stoker's infamous character. The track channels Renfield's internal chaos through a blend of gothic metal and haunting melodies.

The song opens with a relentless guitar riff, setting a tone of urgency and despair. Vocals shift between guttural growls and ethereal cleans, mirroring Renfield's oscillation between madness and fleeting clarity. The addition of flute introduces an eerie, almost otherworldly layer, contrasting the song's heavier elements and enhancing its gothic atmosphere.

Lyrically, Renfield explores themes of guilt, servitude, and the yearning for redemption. The repeated chants of "Rats! Rats!" evoke Renfield's obsession with consuming life to gain strength, while his cries for salvation reflect his internal conflict and desire to atone for his actions. It’s a potent reminder that Renfield is one of Dracula’s most fascinating yet strongly underrated characters — often dismissed as merely insane, but in truth a complex figure torn between darkness and humanity.

[renfield-antics]

Coffins Never Stay Closed

Peter Tremayne’s The Revenge of Dracula takes us back into the shadows cast by Stoker’s novel, but instead of closing the coffin lid, it pries it open wider. This isn’t just another vampire yarn — it’s a continuation that asks, what if Dracula’s destruction wasn’t the end?

The novel leans into the Gothic tradition while also speeding up the pulse with more overt horror. Tremayne doesn’t shy away from the atmosphere we crave: castles looming like black teeth on the horizon, whispers in the crypt, and the constant dread of Dracula’s influence stretching far beyond his supposed death. The Count here is both ghost and presence — not always on the page, but always felt, like a chill you can’t shake.

What makes the book especially engaging is how it treats legacy and consequence. The characters are haunted not only by Dracula himself but by what it means to have fought him. Evil, after all, doesn’t vanish neatly with one stake; it lingers, festers, and demands revenge. Tremayne captures that sense of unfinished business — that Dracula is less a single being and more an eternal curse tied to blood, memory, and fear.

Stylistically, it has that lush, almost Victorian texture while moving with the brisker energy of 20th-century horror. It’s faithful enough to feel like a true sequel, yet bold enough to let Dracula evolve into something new.

The Revenge of Dracula reminds us of a truth every vampire fan knows in their bones: you can kill the monster, but you can’t kill the myth. Dracula always returns — in body, in shadow, or in the very stories we tell to keep his name alive.

[renfield-antics]

Dracula Unbound, Dracula Remade

The BBC’s Dracula miniseries doesn’t just adapt Stoker — it tears the novel apart, stitches the pieces back together, and lets the monster wear the seams proudly. Across three feature-length episodes, it feels less like a faithful retelling and more like a dark game between creators and audience: “What if Dracula were not just a count, but a riddle?”

From the opening in Transylvania, Claes Bang’s Dracula commands the screen — charming, sardonic, terrifying in his hunger, but never simply one thing. He’s a monster with a smirk, a predator who understands the performance of evil. And while some adaptations hide Dracula in shadows, here he is always present, clever enough to make you laugh while you shiver.

Sister Agatha (part Van Helsing, part skeptic, part nun with bite) is the real triumph of this version. She matches Dracula word for word, wit for wit, as if she were built to expose the vampire’s ego. Their battles — of faith, of logic, of sheer will — are where the series feels most alive.

Of course, it isn’t perfect. By the time the story leaps forward into the modern day, it loses some of that candlelit gothic atmosphere and replaces it with something sharper, stranger. Some will love that boldness, others will feel it abandons what makes Dracula eternal. But even in its flaws, it’s fascinating: a mirror cracked, showing us both the timeless monster and the anxieties of our own age.

Dracula (BBC) is messy, stylish, and unafraid to upset tradition. It asks whether the Count’s true terror lies not in his thirst for blood, but in what he reflects back at us: our fear of death, our hunger for control, our need to be remembered.

This isn’t Stoker’s Dracula — but it’s a version that makes you look again at the vampire and wonder what really makes him immortal: the blood he drinks, or the stories we keep telling.

[renfield-antics]

Submission and Seduction: Kris Andersson’s Retelling of Dracula

So, tonight I leave my review without stylistic ai correction. I'm not very confident about it and, personally, don't like some things, but let me know if you like it more than the "refactored" texts.

There’s an unusual short novel on tonight's menu. The world has seen many retellings of Dracula, but this one is different. Kris Andersson in his Harker builds a totally different view of a Jonathan Harker, loving faithful fiancé and husband. By introducing queer relationships, more overt erotic power dynamics, Andersson gives a fresh perspective on a classic myth. He has two loves / relationships: his fiancée, Mina, and also a "rent boy" lover, Renfield. Harker has relationships outside the norm (in his era) — his lover Renfield and Mina both matter. Andersson uses this to heighten the tension between what is socially acceptable (fiancé, Victorian norms) and what is forbidden.

Following the original, Harker began his adventures from being invited to Transylvania to meet Count Dracula for some legal/business purpose, and saw in it not only a career possibilities, but a different kind of pleasure. Harker expects perhaps a mix of business and personal sense of adventure, including erotic possibilities. It appears Andersson plays up the sensual / sexual side more openly than in the original Dracula.

The atmosphere intensifies and becomes more sinister and grim as Johnathan moved closer to the Dracula's domain. He ended up being a Count’s captive. Dracula is charismatic, authoritative, and increasingly "depraved". There’s a darker version of the Dracula myth here: not only is Dracula terrifying, but his hold over Harker involves both sexual / erotic submission and terror. Horror in Harker is not just about supernatural threats but about the body, of being overwhelmed, of loss of autonomy, of the feeling of being trapped in an evil will. As the danger grows, Harker’s initial expectations of an unusual experience and adventures change to horror, abuse, powerlessness. The atmosphere shifts toward terror. The erotic elements serve not just as sensuality, but as part of Dracula’s power over him.

The novella ends with Harker being unable to resist Dracula’s authority, implying a surrender or at least a profound transformation in his relationship to Dracula. It is unclear whether he escapes, or how fully he is "saved" — the work seems designed to emphasize Dracula’s supremacy and the danger of submission.  Harker amplifies the sexual / erotic aspects of the Dracula myth, leaning into desire, submission, taboo. Dracula is not only monstrous, but also alluring and overbearing, pleasure and pain entwined. This  deeply correlates with a popular interpretation of Victorian vampiric tales as a prohibited eroticism and hidden lust. Because it’s a short work, many background elements (what Mina is doing, what Renfield’s situation is in depth, Dracula’s full plan) are less developed.

If you like gothic horror, erotic undertones, and retellings that shift the lens to what is often background in classic literature, Harker is effective. It’s not a sweeping tale, but a dark, intimate exploration of power, desire, and fear.

[renfield-antics]

we can all tell u use ai to write

Yup, I use it to check grammar and rewrite unnatural passages, since English is my third language. Obviously, ai leaves its traces, no hiding.

[renfield-antics]

Renfield: Visions of Madness — A Diary Written in Flies

If you’ve ever wanted to crawl into Renfield’s skull and see the world through his cracked lens, Renfield: Visions of Madness is the door creaking open. This graphic novel doesn’t just retell Dracula — it spirals downward, following Renfield’s fevered descent in ways Stoker only hinted at.

The panels are jagged, the imagery often feverish, like the book itself is infected with Renfield’s obsessions. Flies, spiders, blood, whispers — it’s all there, drawn with a kind of gothic grime that makes you feel like you’ve touched the bars of his cell. What’s striking is how the art mirrors the unraveling: clean lines decay into chaos the deeper we sink into his mind.

Narratively, it leans into his visions and "logic". The idea that consuming life will build him up into something worthy of Dracula becomes both horrifying and heartbreaking. You feel the hunger, but you also feel the loneliness. He’s not just a madman in a straitjacket; he’s a believer, a prophet whose god wears fangs.

Renfield: Visions of Madness is less about Dracula himself and more about what devotion to darkness does to a soul. It’s grotesque, yes, but also weirdly poetic. You finish it with the sense that you’ve read scripture — not holy, but unholy, scrawled in insect wings and candle smoke.

For fans of gothic horror, this book is a reminder: sometimes the most terrifying monsters are not the ones who drink blood, but the ones who beg to serve them.

[renfield-antics]

An astonishing foxenization of Dracula and Renfield made by a friend of mine!

[renfield-antics]

Mina Harker’s Forbidden Diary

Marie Király’s Mina is not just a retelling — it’s a reclamation. Instead of being the passive “angel of the house” we know from Stoker’s novel, here Mina steps out of the margins of letters and journals to speak for herself. The novel takes the fragments of her presence in Dracula and stretches them into a full interior life, one brimming with desire, doubt, and a dangerous curiosity about the vampire who changed her.

What makes this book compelling is its willingness to blur the lines between horror and historical romance. Mina is still the dutiful Victorian wife, but Király allows us to hear the tremors beneath her obedience. She remembers Dracula not just as a monster, but as a presence that awakens something forbidden in her. That tension — between propriety and temptation — runs like a vein of dark blood through the entire novel.

The language is lush, often leaning into a diary-like intimacy. Mina’s world becomes more claustrophobic, more haunted, as she questions what it means to be “saved” and whether her ties to Dracula are truly broken. Instead of Van Helsing’s triumph, we get Mina’s lingering shadows — the aftertaste of vampirism that society prefers to silence.

Is it faithful to Stoker? Not exactly — but that’s its strength. Király lets Mina become more than a vessel for male heroics; she’s a woman navigating madness, hunger, and her own fractured self.

For fans of gothic fiction, Mina feels like a missing chapter: a confession whispered after the stakes have been driven and the men have left the stage. It’s intimate, tragic, and dangerously seductive — the secret life of the woman who walked with Dracula and lived to tell it.

[renfield-antics]

Gothic Ink, Eternal Hunger

There are countless versions of Dracula out there, but Georges Bess doesn’t just retell Bram Stoker’s novel — he paints it in shadow and blood. His Dracula comics feel like opening an illuminated manuscript of nightmares, where every page drips with atmosphere and devotion to Gothic horror.

Bess’s art is both lavish and brutal. Rendered in a classical black-and-white style, it feels timeless — stark contrasts of light and shadow that turn every page into a cathedral of ink. The castles, forests, and stormy seas are drawn with a kind of fevered detail that makes you feel the damp stone under your fingers and the fog on your skin. Dracula himself shifts between alluring nobleman and monstrous beast with frightening ease — sometimes within the same panel. It’s not a romanticized Count; it’s the predator Stoker envisioned, brought to life with a stylish, elegant pen that loves both beauty and terror.

What sets this adaptation apart is its faithfulness to the novel’s mood rather than just its events. The sense of dread, of corruption, of holy symbols faltering in the face of something ancient and hungry — Bess captures that essence perfectly. The black-and-white palette heightens the Gothic drama, evoking the spirit of silent cinema and old engravings, yet with a sharpness that feels modern and alive.

Reading it is like being swallowed by the plot. You don’t just watch Jonathan Harker tremble in the castle or Mina suffer under Dracula’s thrall — you feel it, because the artwork pulls you so deep into the nightmare. It’s gorgeous, it’s grotesque, and it’s utterly entrancing.

For fans of Dracula, this is essential — not just another adaptation, but a visual hymn to the Count’s immortality. Georges Bess doesn’t tame the legend; he resurrects it, letting Dracula stalk once again across the page as both seducer and shadow, in the purest black and white.

[renfield-antics]

The Mad Feast of Renfield

There’s a kind of delicious sick poetry in these lyrics — like watching someone confess a sin while grinning. To Die Elsewhere — Renfield sounds like a fevered monologue scratched on the inside of a coffin: equal parts ravenous confession and warped sermon. It’s not just about hunger; it’s about what hunger does to a mind and how power rots into vanity.

Right away the imagery hooks you: small, grotesque beginnings — "I start with a fly, then move on to a spider" — and a grotesque escalation into ritualized consumption. The progression is chilling because it’s banal: insects, birds, then the implication of greater prey. Each line that follows piles on the unease — the narrator grows stronger from what they take, yet keeps repeating the same damning verdict: "But it’s poison." That refrain is the moral warp at the center of the piece. Strength becomes a tainted currency; victory tastes like decay.

There’s a striking contrast between grandiosity and rot. The throne made of brothers’ spines is gloriously grotesque — a crown you can’t sit on without feeling bone in your palms. And that sudden admission, "I’ve found my treasure here on earth / But soon it will rot with me in the dirt," turns triumph into elegy. The narrator is both conqueror and doomed corpse, which is exactly the kind of tragic self-awareness that makes Renfield such a compelling, pathetic figure.

The piece also flips a moral argument in a subtle, horrific way. One line — "We weren’t made strong to feed off the weak / We were given strength to feed the hungry”"— reads like a justification, a dark gospel that the speaker uses to baptize their appetite. It’s persuasive and monstrous, and that cognitive dissonance is what lingers after the final line, "Give to me what I deserve." The demand feels less like entitlement than a prayer gone wrong.

As a fan piece, this feels perfect: intimate, raw, and theatrical. It invites you into the narrator’s private chapel of madness and makes you complicit simply by listening. If you love Gothic portraits of obsession — those moments where longing and revulsion blur into the same shape — this is a small masterpiece of unease. It doesn’t preach salvation; it hands you a mirror smeared with blood and asks if you recognize yourself.

[renfield-antics]

The Gospel According to Madness

Some books don’t just tell you a story — they whisper to you like voices in the walls of an asylum. The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula is exactly that kind of experience. It takes Stoker’s world and expands it, showing us Dracula’s tale not from the safety of a drawing room, but through the wild, trembling eyes of Renfield himself.

Reading it feels like holding a forbidden manuscript — part confession, part scripture, part fever dream. Renfield’s obsession with his "Lord" bleeds through every page. His voice swings between reverence and madness, prayer and hunger. There’s something unsettlingly beautiful in the way he reframes Dracula, not as a monster to be hunted, but as a messianic figure, a dark savior. It’s blasphemous, it’s chilling, and yet it’s weirdly moving.

What really struck me is how the book manages to balance Gothic atmosphere with psychological horror. The asylum walls close in, the "gospel" passages drip with heresy, and yet you feel this magnetic pull, as if you, too, are being initiated into Dracula’s dark faith. It’s not just a retelling — it’s an inversion, a mirror turned backwards where holy water rusts, crosses fail, and devotion belongs not to God but to the Count.

If Dracula is about the terror of facing evil, then The Book of Renfield is about the terror of joining it willingly. It’s the kind of book that makes you want to light a candle, pray for your soul, and then immediately blow it out and whisper, "Yes, Master."

The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula is unholy scripture for anyone who loves their Gothic horror laced with madness, theology, and the seductive gravity of the undead. It’s disturbing. It’s fascinating. And it lingers long after you close the cover — like a voice in the dark asking if you’ll let it in.