In 1964 he completed a Famous Writers Course and in 1973 a course of the Washington School of Art. He studied history and social sciences at Harpur College, Binghamton, where he graduated in 1961 with a bachelor's degree.
Ktara suggests that he is much older than the Transylvania myths, incarnating through various forms back over the centuries to a civilization currently lost to history.Lory is the son of Edward and Dorothy Lory. Although Dracula is essentially a secondary character, when he is let loose by Harmon, violence and mayhem follow–usually against a group of rather unlucky thugs.Ī few ruminations on the nature of evil are sprinkled throughout, along with a tease on the origins of Dracula. The tenuous truce between Dracula and Harmon is the central tension of the story, threatening to come undone if the professor’s device ever fails. It contains a sliver of wood that Harmon is able to trigger telepathically, ensuring that Dracula follows his instructions or be struck down with a tiny stake to the heart.ĭracula’s hunger for blood, coupled with the restrictions created by Harmon’s device, essentially forge him into a violent weapon to be used against the crime organizations running the city.ĭracula Returns! reads very much like the first volume of a series, establishing the characters and setting up the basic premise. Before resuscitating the legendary figure, he implants a small device near the vampire’s heart. Harmon has his own agenda, however, and will not be made the pawn of the vampire and his familiar. Joined by Cameron Sanchez, a brawny ex-policeman, Harmon fights gangsters and hoods populating seedy rough streets and seedy waterfronts, an old-school world of crime in which Dick Tracy or The Shadow wouldn’t seem out of place.Īpproached by Ktara, a strange woman with the ability to shapeshift into the form of a cat, with an unusual proposition, Harmon eventually travels to Romania on a mythic quest: revive the slumbering remains of Count Dracula. Harmon’s pursuit of the weird sciences has led him to develop a number of unusual tools to use in his fight against crime, including a keen personal telekinetic ability. Professor Damien Harmon, academic of the occult arts, is a former criminal investigator with a grudge against the street gang whose vicious near-fatal attack left him confined to a wheelchair. Robert Lory’s first installment in his nine-volume Dracula series reads more like a thirties pulp men’s adventure than a seventies horror, with the fabled Count (like an attack dog on a short leash) weaponized and employed in service against the criminal underworld. Robert Lory | Kensington Publishing | 1973 | 189 pages
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