DRACULA'S LITERARY DESCENDENTS

Dracula, it would seem, is too big for his book. Though Stoker never wrote a sequel, many other authors have risen to the chall­enge, mainly since the 1970s. This is the period when the novel started to become the focus of an academic/critical industry and the Romanian connection became more widely known. There­after, the popularity of video and DVD technology meant that the movies, from Nosferatu through the Uni­versal and Hammer series, made the visual history of Dracula immed­iately available, while the Internet sometimes looks as though it was invented solely for people wanting to discuss (and occasionallybecome) vampires. The short but amazingly influential history ofDracula has thus become better known as time goes by, with an apparently limitless proliferation of comment being inspired by a single novel. There’s obviously a massive hunger for the strictly finite amount of Dracula that Stoker provided, so it’s understandable that other authors have tried to take his story further, demonstrating a range of attitudes to their source material. 

In a sublimely silly series of New English Library paperbacks, Robert Lory brought the Count to 1970s New York, held under the dubious control of an embittered ex-cop by the device of a mini-stake embedded in his heart. Between 1975 and 2002, Fred Saberhagen produced 10 Dracula novels, which start out by re-telling the original story from the vampire’s viewpoint before bringing him into interaction with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and Merlin. Peter Tremayne has written a trio of novels drawing on the shared identity of Vlad Tepes and the vampire Count, while Kim Newman, in Anno Dracula (1992),The Bloody Red Baron (1995) and Dracula Cha Cha Cha (1998) has created a brilliant postmodern fantasy in which history and literature combine in an almost-recognisable melée where Dracula reigns. Some of the sequels draw more closely on the larger cast of the original. Sean Manchester’s Carmel (2000) follows the story of Mina and Jonathan Harker’s grandson, while Freda Warrington’s Dracula the Undead (1997, re-issued 2009) has a re-animated Dracula once again crossing swords with the Harker family. 

2009 has also seen an “official” sequel co-authored (along with film-writer Ian Holt) by Stoker’s great grand-nephew Dacre Stoker: Dracula the Un-Dead. This picks up the threads 25 years after the end of the original, with Mina’s theatre-besotted son falling under the spell of a dashing, charismatic Romanian actor. Meanwhile, the elderly survivors of the first book are being picked off with maximum violence in a complex plot that involves a prominent display of period detail, close attention to Stoker’s working notes, historical and personal references, a nod to Jack the Ripper (see below) and rather more than a nod to Countess Bathory (FT223:38–43). Once again, the character of Dracula is cast in a fresh light. In an interesting afterword, the author discusses his sources, explaining that his family’s relationship with the Dracula industry was a fraught one, and that to some extent his novel was written to reclaim the character in the spirit of the original: 

“Ian, being a true idealist, had a plan that inspired me to not accept the frustrating history of Dracula. He wanted to change history… to re-establish creative control over Bram’s novel and characters by writing a sequel that bore the Stoker name… We aimed to resurrect Bram’s original themes and characters, just as Bram had conceived them more than a century ago. So many books and films had strayed from Bram’s vision – and thus our intent was to give both Bram and Dracula back their dignity in some small way.” 

Meanwhile Dracula lives on in a slightly different way in the most recent scholarly edition, The New Annotated Dracula (2009; see FT246:62–63). Along with all the expected footnotes and references, editor Leslie S Klinger manages to infiltrate a meta-fictional structure that the casual reader certainly won’t be expecting. He deals with some of the inconsistencies in Stoker’s plot by explaining that the author was in fact writing up a history of real events, having to blur some of the details to protect the innocent, and being hounded by Dracula himself to provide a version that would fool the public. Thus that unsatisfactory death scene is a smokescreen – Dracula didn’t die and is effectively authorising Stoker’s novel so that his continued depred­ations through Victorian London can go unchecked. As The New Annotated Draculadoesn’t make this whimsical fictional super-structure at all apparent, it is bound to fuel yet more confusion as to just what Stoker intended. 

Less controversially, Dracula has also walked out of the novel and into other fictional worlds. He has appeared in Marvel comics since the 1970s, and in 1991, DC comics published Batman and Dracula: Red Rain, the first of a trio of graphic novels where the Caped Crusader’s bat-like identity found a natural home in the vampire community. The Count makes a great guest-star too; one of his funniest and most knowing reappearances is in Buffy vs Dracula, the opening episode of the TV show’s 5th series (2000). Something of a poseur, seen by the other vampires as overplaying his seductive reputation, he was played by Rudolph Martin, who also in 2000 appeared in the title role of Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula, an American film shot on location in Rom­ania and telling the story of Vlad III Dracula (Vlad Tepes.) Fact and fiction continue their complex relationship…