Appeared in the London Guardian
Stoker’s blood relation resurrects Dracula
Van Helsing and his intrepid band of vampire hunters might have disposed of Bram Stoker’s creation Dracula more than a century ago, but a sequel to the novel by Stoker’s great grand-nephew will see them under attack from the undead once again.
Dacre Stoker delved into his ancestor’s handwritten notes on the original Dracula novel to pen his sequel, Dracula: The Un-Dead – the original name for Dracula before an editor changed the title. The novel, out next October, draws on excised characters, existing character back-stories and plot threads that were cut from Stoker’s original novel, first published 111 years ago.
The new book is set in London in 1912, a quarter of a century after the Count apparently “crumbled into dust”. Vampire-hunter Van Helsing’s protégé Dr Seward is now a disgraced morphine addict, and Quincey, the son of Stoker’s hero Jonathan, has become involved in a troubled theatre production of Dracula, directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself. The play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents’ terrible secrets, but before he can confront them a family member is found murdered, impaled in Piccadilly Circus.
The original is written in classic epistolatory form, alternating between different narrators; the sequel adopts a more direct storytelling route. “[This] makes it more immediately accessible to a modern thriller readership, while remaining faithful to the spirit and atmosphere of the Victorian original,” said publisher Jane Johnson of HarperCollins UK.
The book has caused a storm in the publishing world, selling for more than a million dollars to Dutton US, HarperCollins UK and Penguin Canada. A film version is also in the works, with shooting expected to begin next June.
Dacre Stoker, who formerly coached the Canadian Olympic Pentathlon team and now lives in the US, is writing the novel with Dracula historian Ian Holt, a member of The Transylvanian Society of Dracula. The Un-Dead is the first Dracula story to be fully authorized by the Stoker family since the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi.
Stoker said he only got around to reading his great grand-uncle’s novel when he went to college. “Word got out about my family connection to the old vamp and I grew tired of being unable to answer people’s questions. So, I chose to finally break down and read the novel for a research paper on Bram and his possible motivations to write the story,” he said. “I had seen so many film versions of Dracula and was terribly surprised that very few of the films had any resemblance to Bram’s original novel. Because the novel was so good and had stood up so well over the years, I found it exceedingly sad that all of the trash Hollywood had put out monumentally sullied Bram’s and my family’s literary legacy.”
Stoker later met Holt, a screenwriter, and the pair decided to work together to resurrect Bram Stoker’s original themes and characters. “Our intent is to give both Bram and Dracula back their dignity,” Stoker said. “Maybe even more important is to give the novel’s legions of loyal fans what they have been waiting over a century for … the return of the real Dracula.”
Stoker’s original Dracula, the forefather of the wave of vampire novels currently flooding the bookshops, has never been out of print since it was published in 1897, and according to Dacre Stoker’s agent is only outsold by the Bible. The sequel will be competing with two other high profile vampire novels published next year: film director Guillermo del Toro’s debut The Strain, about a vampiric virus which invades New York, and Justin Cronin’s The Passage, about a vampire plague spawned by medical experiments.
