A Bloody Habit

It is 1900, the dawn of a new century. Even as the old Queen's health fails, Victorian Britain stands monumental and strong upon a mountain of technological, scientific, and intellectual progress. For John Kemp, a straight-forward, unimaginative London lawyer, life seems reassuringly predictable yet forward-leaning, that is, until a foray into the recently published sensationalist novel Dracula, united with a chance meeting with an eccentric Dominican friar, catapults him into a bizarre, violent, and unsettling series of events.

As London is transfixed with terror at a bloody trail of murder and destruction, Kemp finds himself in its midst, besieged on all sides--in his friendships, as those close to him fall prey to vicious assault by an unknown assassin; in his deep attraction to an unconventional American heiress; and in his own professional respectability, for who can trust a lawyer who sees things which, by all sane reason, cannot exist? Can his mundane, sensible life--and his skeptical mind--withstand vampires? Can this everyday Englishman survive his encounter with perhaps an even more sinister threat--the white-robed Papists who claim to be vampire slayers?

Eleanor Bourg Nicholson is the assistant executive editor for Dappled Things and assistant editor for the Saint Austin Review (StAR). She is editor of several Ignatius Critical Editions volumes, and has collaborated with other editors to provide footnotes for numerous others. Her epistolary novella, The Letters of Magdalen Montague (2011), is available through the kind patronage of Kaufmann Publishing. Her work has appeared in theNational Catholic Register and Touchstone, as well as with First Thingsand The Catholic Thing.