'Dracula' sequel may cause Halloween flap

• By GREG LANGLEY
• Books editor
• Published: Oct 25, 2009

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

DRACULA THE UN-DEAD
By Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt
Dutton, $26.95

Dracula, the fictional vampire, refused to die. He lived on in an un-dead state, subsisting on human blood that he sucked from his victims’ necks after inflicting a bite to the carotid. Dracula, the cultural phenomenon, has proven equally resilient.

Although it wasn’t the first vampire novel, after Dracula by Bram Stoker was published in 1897, the book gradually grew in popularity until it attracted the notice of movie makers in early Hollywood. Once it was made into a movie, it was a smash hit. More movies followed, more books — sequels and prequels, imitators and spin-offs. There was Dark Shadows on television in the ’60s, Anne Rice’s vampire novels and now the hit series on cable TV, True Blood, and the hit Twilight books and movies, and more and more. There is even a children’s character on the show Sesame Street who is based on Dracula.

This book might seem to be just another vampire novel — except for the name of the co-author: Dacre Stoker. He is the great-grandnephew of the author of Dracula.

In this book, Stoker and Holt follow the lives of the surviving characters from Bram Stoker’s original book: Jonathan and Mina Harker, Dr. John Seward, Arthur Holmwood and Abraham Van Helsing. As the story unfolds, Seward, now old, is tracking a new vampire in France — a female named Countess Elizabeth Bathory. He sneaks up to a villa window and observes the fiendish ritual taking place inside. The victim has been tortured and hung upside down on a railed pulley system.

“The young girl, pathetic gurgles issuing from her throat, was suspended above the edge of the empty mosaic bath. Bathory stood at the bottom; arms outstretched, neck arched back, magnificently naked. She turned her palms upward. It was a signal. In that instant, the dark-haired Woman in White used her fingernail to slit the young lady’s throat and pushed her to the end of the track just above where Bathory waited. Seward saw Bathory’s fanged mouth open wide as she orgasmically bathed in a shower of blood.”

So begins the confrontation between the vampire and the original members of the circle that hunted down Dracula in the first book. One by one, they begin to die.

It’s Mina Harker who is the main focus of the narrative. Dracula fans will recall that she was partially transformed by her relationship with the old count in the original story — he forced her to drink some of his blood. It still has an effect on her.

“For Mina, the past seemed to shroud her life in eternal darkness. At soirées in recent years, Mina had heard countless remarks that she must possess a portrait of herself that was aging in the attic, just like Dorian Gray in Mr. Wilde’s risqué story published in Lippincott’s Magazine. To poor Jonathan, it was no laughing matter but rather a constant reminder of her betrayal. She could see how he loathed looking at her now, though she tried to please him by dressing more maturely than she appeared. Even in the most spinsterish of clothing, her youthful appearance glowed through. Jonathan was now fifty years of age but looked ten years older. She understood how he suffered and why he drank.”

The Harkers might have separated but for their child, Quincey, now a young man. Quincey is at odds with his father, Jonathan, but he is close to his mother.

Quincey wants to be an actor, but Jonathan opposes this idea. When Quincey meets a young Romanian actor, Basarab, in Paris, he feels he has met a kindred soul.

Basarab is, of course, not who he seems. As members of the original band begin to die off, Jonathan and Mina are terrified. They worry for Quincey. When Quincey meets a playwright and author named Bram Stoker who is producing a play called Dracula, it’s one of the most mind-bending plot twists in years. The characters in the play have the same names as Quincey’s parents. He is astonished — his parents have kept the truth from him all these years.

Just when you think you’re going to suffer permanent vertigo from the spinning plot, the authors somehow make it all clear and it works.