DRACULA & CARMILLA

This double billing of Bram Stoker's DRACULA, and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's CARMILLA, the vampire story that inspired Stoker, is piercingly wonderful. Bookended by haunting music, the tales share gripping plots, first-person narrators, requisite settings in mountainous middle Europe, and some people with sharp teeth. They also have fantastic narrators. In CARMILLA, Alison Larkin's crystalline tone transmutes as needed from young English girl to old European man, and her pacing transforms the old-fashioned sentences into easy listening while maintaining tension. Clive Hayward's performance of the tightly plotted DRACULA is a tour de force of clear narration, ratcheting-up anxiety, and astonishing characterizations of everyone from English country gal to the Vlad himself. Do not miss the postproduction chat between Larkin and Hayward, which adds to the production's many pleasures. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2018]