In Irwin’s reimagining of the Dickens classic, Orphan Pip is a werewolf. Pip’s sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, is not, as lycanthrophy passes down through the male side, and this adds to her natural bitterness. Uncle Pumblechook is a zombie broker who gets Pip involved in the family business of exhuming bodies to zombify and sell to the gentry. Miss Havisham is a blood-sucking fiend whose hatred for Compeyson, the vampire who turned her, has caused her to channel her rage into training Estella to be a slayer of supernatural creatures. Pip and Estella believe they cannot be together as she has been nurtured to hate everything Pip represents...but Estella’s self-image is shaken when she discovers that she is half-werewolf herself. Can Pip and Estella ever find happiness and raise a litter of pups of their own?

Filled with plenty of supernatural surprises, this amusing tale will have fans of both Dickens and literary mash-ups clamoring for more.< "Erwin's previous literary mashup, Jane Slayre, embodies the flawless union of supernatural fiction and the best of classic literature. She continues in this captivating and fascinating tradition, here taking on Dickens's Great Expectations. There are no glossy Hollywood creatures of the night within these pages but monsters that seem to have crawled from the darkest corners of Dickens's fertile imagination. The orphaned Pip is an unlikely werewolf, ever pining for the aloof slayer Estella, and Miss Havisham's hermetic existence amplifies her tortured suffering as a brokenhearted vampire. The twists and turns of the plot follow familiar paths into uncharted territory, leaving us reassured and spellbound all at once.

Verdict: The original Dickens is eerie and unsettling, and Erwin rises to the challenge, creating another masterpiece by making the strange even stranger. Highly recommended; astounding great fun! — Library Journal< CHAPTER 1

My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my occasionally altered infant tongue could make of either name nothing longer or more explicit than Pip, sometimes Yip. So I called myself Pip, on occasion Yip, and came to be called Pip. I give Pirrip as my father’s family name on the authority of his tombstone and my sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the silversmith. As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them, my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The enormity of my father’s stone, the shape of the letters, gave me an odd idea that he was fierce and stout, requiring great effort to hold back even in death, with coarse black hair curling over every inch of him when the moon was full— for he was my sire in the truest sense, responsible for the beast within me, according to Mrs. Joe. From the character and turn of the inscription, “Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that my mother was freckled and sickly, entirely human.

The wolfish nature was passed from male to male down the line, Mrs. Joe said, almost with a grudging air by way of explanation. There had been known to be female werewolves, but only as infected by a bite and never by birth (again with the bitter tone). And birth, or at least infancy, was quite a trial for my kind, or so it seemed by the five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside my parents’ graves, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine, who gave up exceedingly early in that universal struggle.

I believed that they had all been born as pink gasping babes, unable to cope with the violence of transformation when the first moon came and proved too strong a foe for their inferior infant bodies. I, on the other hand, was born under a full moon as a robust pup, and stronger in wolf form to handle the force of the change when it next came on, for experience had taught me that werewolf to human was a much less traumatic transformation than human to wolf.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within twenty miles of the sea. My first vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to have been gained on a memorable raw evening under a full moon. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard, where Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana, wife of the above, were buried. And that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, also dead, were buried. And that the small bundl Read Less