Book Review: The Secret of Barnabas Collins
August 15, 2024
This is the third book I’ve read in the series of novels by Marilyn Ross that are based on the Dark Shadows TV show. However, there are a few books between this one and the others I’ve read, and the gap might explain some of the changes that I encountered.
The setting of the book is 1968. (It was published in 1969.) The other books aren’t specific about their time.
In this book, the house is now known as “Collinwood,” which is almost certainly an attempt to match the television show, even though tho these books are not part of that universe.
No spoilers, but in this book Barnabas is living in a pub room (not in the Old House), and the story features a Spiritualist Medium which really adds a nice occult element. We also learn that Barnabas can only feed on females, which justifies the many romances interweaving through the series.
This time, I didn’t notice any Hitchockian references to “dark shadows” in the story, but I am beginning to think that a drinking game based on the author using “wan” would be killer.
You can find a copy of this book at Amazon, of course, but wouldn’t it be more fun to let fate decide if you’re fortunate enough to encounter it in a used bookstore?
This is such an interesting phenomenon -- a franchise tie-in that is more of its own universe. I mean, Barnabas not living at the Old House? That makes this a parallel universe Dark Shadows. Which is ... sort of weird, right? You'd think the franchise would wish for some continuity. The very, very, very marvelous and highly recommended Addams Family novel by Jack Sharkey came out just before the tv series did, and Sharkey obviously was privy to *most* of the important details that would be in the tv series. There are a handful of things that veer slightly from the tv show, but for the most part the chapters of the novel read as sort of lost episodes from the tv series. I would have thought Dark Shadows novels would have been rooted in the universe of the tv series, too. I suppose that Barnabas living in a pub is technically more interesting and makes this novel more like a window into an alternate reality.
Posted by: Craig Conley | August 21, 2024 at 10:50 PM