Published August 18, 2008

In Reese's scrupulously imagined thriller, told largely through entries from a lost journal kept by the author of Dracula in 1888, Bram Stoker attends an indoctrination ceremony of the Order of the Golden Dawn, at the behest of Oscar Wilde's mum and a young William Butler Yeats.

The ceremony goes horribly awry, resulting in one participant -- Francis Tumblety, a patent medicine salesman newly arrived from America -- becoming a vessel for the evil Egyptian god Set and applying his surgical skills to the slaughter of Whitechapel prostitutes in order to draw Stoker out for a supernatural showdown.

Bestseller Reese (The Witchery) so perfectly pastiches the journal format that initially his story reads as dry and boringly as most private diaries. With Tumblety's malignant conversion, though, the novel turns into a rip-roaring penny dreadful that compels reading to the end.

Dracula fans will appreciate the nods to well-known works that Stoker wrote supposedly following this confrontation.