Electric Boogaloo

 Many years ago (like 2002), I found David Bergantino's Hamlet II: Ophelia's Revenge on the sale rack at the library I used frequently. I remember reading it then, but it's been a while since I last slogged through this. 

I'm sure most folks have a general idea of the plot of Shakespeare's Hamlet, and this is essentially the same story with the addition of another vengeful ghost running around Elsinore Castle, the ghost of one particularly angry spirit who's been in a bog for several centuries. 

But first, we open on a football game between Globe University and Fortinbras University, as QB Cameron Dean pulls a trick play to win the game by pretty much climbing over geeky freshmen Rosenberg and Gyllenhal. A late hit in the end zone reveals a vision of Cameron's father, who tells him that he was murdered by his Aunt Claudia, and Cameron is to be the agent of his vengeance.  Cameron is summoned by mother Gerti (who's currently shacked up with Claudia), to be informed that in a few weeks, on his 21st birthday, he is to inherit a family estate in Denmark. 

Anyway, the book past that hits several of the same beats as the play, with changed names and circumstances. (Cameron hires a band in to sing of how Claudia killed his father, pretty much everyone dies....) The difference being that Cameron and his entourage's (He invites the entire team and a guest to go along) happens to wake up a certain vengeful spirit who somehow wound up in a bog after Cameron's twinned soul forsook her. Ophelia wastes no time possessing most of the minor characters, usually women, causing them to drown while strangling their men, in her wrath against love.

Amusingly, two characters who are pronounced dead, don't end up dead, really. Indeed, it's revealed that the terror of the events have lead them to realize their love for one another, which is a bit better than getting shipped to England to get executed on arrival. 

Honestly, the problems with this novel it shares with Shakespeare. The first act drags, and drags badly. Once Ophelia wakes up, things improve, and one gets the sense that the author, like several goth girls of my acquaintance think Ophelia should have had a beer and a one night stand when Hamlet went off on her rather than swimming in peat. 

I mean, Hamlet is not my favorite. Bergantino does well updating it for a modern audience, but it's still the same old story with some new window dressing.