Horror in his blood
‘Dracula’ kin sinks his teeth into scribe’s past
Dacre Stoker will never forget how he discovered his family history. It was Halloween, and some revelers showed up at the door with a twist on the usual “trick or treat” spiel: “Are the Stokers gonna give us candy or take our blood?”
Puzzled, the 12-year-old Dacre asked his father what they meant. So his dad led him down to the basement, pulled a dusty, mustard-colored book off a shelf and handed it to him.
It was a first edition of “Dracula,” signed by author Bram Stoker — the older brother of Dacre’s great-grandfather. Dacre, now 60, was too young at the time to truly appreciate it, but blood will tell: Decades later, the Montreal native found himself pulling together pieces of his ancestor’s lost literary legacy.
The result is “Dracul” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), a prequel to Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic. As Dacre and co-writer J.D. Barker discovered, Bram’s publishers edited out the first 101 pages of his original manuscript.
“I’ve read ‘Dracula’ a million times, and it always starts with Jonathan Harker and that train,” Barker told The Post.
To find what went missing, he and Stoker tracked down other editions and combed through the legendary writer’s letters and journals. Luckily, Bram left plenty of breadcrumbs.
“He always carried a notebook with him and would jot down these little phrases,” Barker said. “It could be a sentence about Dracula, then one about the weather.”
Some of the new novel’s material was drawn from Dacre’s interviews with cousins across Canada and England. Bram, he learned, was the sickliest of seven siblings, who grew up in Dublin, Ireland. “One of the mysteries of Stoker lore is, what was the illness, and what prompted the recovery?”
Bram’s early frailty aside, continued Dacre, a former Olympic coach for Canada’s pentathlon team, “he was the only one in the family who had the strength to break away from his father.”
A love of theater drew Bram to London, where he became the business manager for the Lyceum Theatre, the home base of famed actor Henry Irving.
Commanding, demanding and mesmerizing, Irving reportedly inspired the character of Dracula, which Bram initially wrote as a play. When Irving declined to stage it, the writer turned his script into a novel.
“Bram originally tried to sell ‘Dracula’ as a true story, as crazy as that sounds,” Barker said.
Then again, with tuberculosis and other infectious diseases running rampant, the idea of some monstrous bloodsucker might not have been so far-fetched.
Among his ancestor’s papers, much of them left to Trinity College, Dublin, Dacre discovered an 1896 clipping from the New York World newspaper headlined “New England Vampire Scare.”
Did the “Dracula” creator think vampires were real?
“I believe he was open-minded about the possibility that they existed,” said Dacre, who has had to field many questions about his famous forebear. Among them is a theory that Bram — who married Oscar Wilde’s old flame, Florence, with whom he had one child — was a closeted homosexual.
“That’s one of the rumors that started with biographers, but I’ve never seen any proof,” said Dacre, who now lives in South Carolina. “It was said that Florence was tough as nails, but saying they had a sexless marriage because they had one child?”
As for the suggestion that Bram died of syphilis? Not true, says Dacre, who e-mailed The Post a copy of his great-great-uncle’s death certificate. It cites exhaustion, “locomotor [ataxia]” (a disease whose sufferers cannot control their movements) and a kidney ailment as the cause of the writer’s death, in 1912, at 64.
Bram’s big regret, it seems, was that his long work hours cut into the time he had for his only child, Noel. Still, the writer apparently did what he could, and Noel didn’t seem to hold it against him: He went to good schools, became an accountant and, in his last wishes, asked that his ashes be combined with his father’s in an urn at London’s Golders Green Cemetery.
As far as anyone knows, they’re still there.