DRACUL

Fam Stoker’s Dracula

nine years ago, bram stoker’s great-grand-nephew Dacre co-authored Dracula The Undead, the self-proclaimed “official sequel” to his great-grand-uncle’s greatest novel. Now he’s back with Dracul; not quite a prequel, more “the story behind the story”, showing how the young Bram’s various encounters with the actual, real-life vampire Count inspired him to put pen to paper.

We begin with the sickly seven-year-old Bram living just outside Dublin under the care of an uncanny nanny – one who secretly sleeps in a box of soil hidden under her bed. The bulk of the book takes place 14 years later, when Bram learns exactly who his “Nanna Ellen” was, what she was doing in semi-rural Ireland, and who she was trying to escape. You might expect Stoker’s subsequent adventures, in the company of siblings Thornley and Matilda, to take him to Whitby, and eventually to mittel-Europe; you might also expect references to fly-eating, the appearance of a Van Helsing-like professor of the esoteric, and a female relative to fall under the vampire’s spell. In all this, you will not be disappointed.

But despite several striking set-pieces – and the past life of Nanna Ellen, when it comes, is undoubtedly the novel’s best sequence – the whole suffers from lapses into 21st century idiom and Americanism. That’s a significant issue when you’re writing, as per the original Dracula, in epistolary form – that is, in letters supposedly authored by 19th century Anglo-Irish correspondents. Someone has “snuck out”; someone says “We need to talk”; the “leaves of fall” have begun to “turn color”; and most painfully, the Count himself tells a woman she looks “stunning”!

A lengthy afterword persists with the cobblers claim that Bram’s novel was written as a warning of some horrid truth. All very amusing, of course, but we can’t help thinking that you don’t best honour an ancestor by negating their genius, and instead insisting that their greatest work was a disguised autobiography. Alan Barnes

Bram Stoker also had a walk-on part in Dracula The Undead… along with Elizabeth Bathory, and even Jack the Ripper!