“Why won’t you watch Buffy?” Asked my BFF while driving at her space normal speed of 50 MPH on a city street in an old Nisan convertible with the top down.
“Because I don’t want to get obsessed with vampires like I was when I was a teenager.”
“Obsessed like how? I’m obsessed.”
“Yeah, you are, but have you sealed your bedroom windows with a paste made of crushed garlic, then painted a row of tiny crosses with actual 24 Karat gold leaf around the edge of each window pane?”
“What? Hell no. [pause] I’d be, like —- What’s the opposite of garlic??”
So it was with some trepidation that I picked up the copy of DRACULA; The Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original Classic, by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. I felt somewhat protected by the simple fact that the book has three titles.
With some exceptions, the characters from the original Dracula by Bram Stoker, continue (at least by name) from the first book into this sequel, which is a true sequel and not a re-imagining or re-framing of the story. Except that it is. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Back to the Original Version
For those few who do not know the story or about the story, the Original tells the story of how a vampire named (duh) Dracula makes use of the services of young solicitor Jonathan Harker to make his way from rural Romania to the outskirts of London. Shortly after Dracula’s arrival, he begins his seduction (there’s no other word for it) of the unfortunate and 1.75 dimensional Lucy Westenra, whom he successfully turns into a vampire. No clue is ever provided within the text as to why he picks Lucy or how she comes to his attention. Did he come to England specifically to find Lucy? We get to make up our own minds about that.
Jonathan, his (eventual) wife Mina and a small band of heroes chase down the evil invader from the east, some of whom tell their own part of the story in the first person, after the manner of Wilkie Collins. There is no omniscient narrator, no final authority to whom we can turn to let us know what is true and what is false. The closest we get to that luxury is Van Helsing. The reader decides for herself whether any particular narrator is reliable. Because, especially in the earlier parts of the book, the characters themselves know and present only fragments of the overall story, unlike most modern works of fiction, Dracula requires that the reader participate in the story by actually thinking.
Imagine!
Van Helsing in his narrative sections goes on for much too long at a time, and far too often, and then everyone else just runs off and does what he says, with no evidence whatsoever that he has a clue what he’s talking about other than his own commanding presence. At first, his curious use of English is entertaining, then it often becomes confusing and sometimes cloying, at least to this modern reader. Otherwise, the characters have such distinctive voices, perspectives, and commentaries that it’s possible to tell which narrator is talking to you by the tone and content of the passage.
The one critical character from whom we never hear is, of course, Dracula himself. Or, as Van Helsing would probably prefer it, Itself.
The Heroes discover poor Lucy’s fate and kill the vampire she’s become, and she becomes visibly human again, and they know they’ve saved her soul as she has not yet taken a life in her vampire form, during which time she supposedly had no soul to lose. Subsequent vampire deaths follow, (we always get descriptions of male humans driving massive stakes into the writhing bodies of female vampires), culminating in a wretchedly slow lead-up to the death of the title character at Castle Dracula deep in the Carpathian mountains.
Unlike the various Draculae of film, Stoker’s original has nothing sexy about him:
His face was a strong – a very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality for a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin.
Mmmm. Sexy.
Nothing remotely like Bela Lugosi or Frank Langella or Christopher Lee. Only Gary Oldham’s portrayal comes close to the image presented by Bram Stoker in the Original. And I didn’t even get to the hands, which are stubby, have pointy fingernails like your Aunt Estelle in 1952 and hairy palms. Palms.
So what makes this book such a masterpiece of Victorian pornography?
It’s the women. It usually is, but here there are the three overtly voluptuous female vampires at Castle Dracula whose sexuality Harker actually finds frightening before he realizes they don’t want kisses of the garden variety. There is fragile, ethereal, plot-device Lucy, who epitomizes the ideal woman of the Eighteenth Century, over against her best friend Mina Harker, who is thoroughly modern (knows shorthand, types – albeit both in preparation of being useful to her husband in his legal career – picks up a revolver without flinching or struggling with the weight of it – and is described as having the brain/mind of a man).
Mina is the bridge between the two books, the hinge, as it were, on which the narrative turns from Bram’s original vision to that of the sequel. And Mina turns.
Now for the Sequel
In the sequel, Dracula; the Un-Dead, the title character himself is definitely a post-Barnabas, post-Spike, post-Angel, post-Edward, and most especially post-9/11 kind of vampire. Vlad has, by virtue of driving back the Renaissance Islamist invasion of Europe, become not a bad guy at all, just seriously misunderstood. All that impaling.
In the sequel, nice female vampires follow their beloved in acts of suttee-like devotion. Bad female vampires bite the girls and they like it.
The Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel was a count. In the new book, he’s a prince, and identification of the novel’s character Dracula with the historical Vlad III Dracula who defeated the Turkish Empire’s attempt to invade Europe with extremely severe measures, is made express, explicit and complete. No ambiguity here, whereas in the original novel there are hints as to a possible connection. This new Prince Vlad was a papal favorite, a hero of the Christian West, a good-guy member of the (historically real but somewhat murky) Order of the Dragon. This book’s Dracula is the übermensch we’ve all been waiting for.
Also notable is that, in direct contradiction to the BtVS-verse, not to mention the original Dracula as envisioned by Bram Stoker, it turns out that vampires do in fact have souls. Let the debate begin.
The book opens with a scene so overtly, and so over-the-top-ly, pornographic readers will either put the book down or lick their lips for more. There won’t be much middle ground. The body count is almost insanely high.
The villain of this piece is actually not Dracula himself, but Elizabeth Bathory, who, like Vlad III Dracula was an actual historical person. In the first book, Count Dracula had three female attendants. In the second, the Countess has two, who are physically similar to two of the female vampires in the original. In the first, the sexuality of the piece is submerged, hinted at, most overt in the scene where Mina is discovered drinking blood from a wound Dracula has made in his chest.
In the Original, Dracula has three female attendants, two dark-haired, one fair. Bathory here has two, one dark haired, one fair. When, in the Original, Lord Godalming hammers the massive wooden stake into his beloved’s heart to destroy the vampire she’s become and her head is subsequently severed from her body, no mention is made of her body crumbling to dust, only of her restoration to her humanity in death. When Van Helsing does his “butcher’s work,” destroying Dracula’s female followers, they specifically are described as crumbling to dust. Perhaps this has something to do with how long one was a vampire before being killed/rescued, or perhaps given how vigorously Lucy’s beauty has been impressed upon us, it would have been too much to have her crumble to ash just after her would-be husband has pierced her with his big stick.
Dracula himself crumbles to ash when stabbed with a kukri and his throat is cut at the end 0f the first book. He is the only male vampire killed in the book, and killed by human men, and there is no piercing with a big stick, which I think clearly demonstrates that Stoker was fully intentional about the sexual symbolism of the stake. And yet, Dracula has managed to return. So one wonders whether the two attendants on Countess Bathory have any identity with the attendants on Dracula or are they meant merely to recall him and Bathory’s replacement of Dracula as villain.
Bathory is more an embodiment of the mythical Lilith as she is of the historical Countess who spent the last years of her life bricked up for killing possibly as many as 600 women. And yet, there are significant differences. The fictional Bathory of this narrative began her human life like any other girl, then was denied the chance to be a normal wife and mother, her nature was twisted by the early experiences of her life. Her children are lost to her, the husband who should have loved her was cruel, and at least in this fictional version, in her vulnerability she was preyed upon by someone she should have been able to trust. Bathory’s evil is the evil of the misplaced, thwarted feminine.
Mina, still young thanks to the gift received from Dracula, still strong, is a loyal if frustrated wife and mother, her Jonathan still alive, but obviously ageing while she is not. Her son Quincey, named for the band of heroes but called by the name of the one who died in the fight, is himself abnormally strong, and inexplicably attracted to an actor who goes by the name of Barsabas. Quincey, you see, wants to be an actor himself. He first sees Barsabas perform in Paris, where Quincey has been sent to pursue his education, away from distracting influences.
You can stop laughing now.
The now aged (except for Mina) Band of Heroes tries to reconstitute itself, to fight once more the evil they (in this version mistakenly) perceive Dracula to be. But we are let in on the secrets – Dracula, who is now living in the persona of the famous actor Barsabas, is the Prince who saved Europe from the Turks, he is the hero who saved the West, with a soul, with a good soul that seeks to serve God – the same character who could not endure the presence of a consecrated Host now claims status as papal representative against the Infidel.
And then one can look backward and see the three voluptuous women who attended Dracula in his castle in a different light. Impaling was, sometimes, used by the Romans and referred to as crucifixion. And the name Basarbas, which was in fact Vlad III Dracula the Impaler’s family name, conveniently, is an anagram for Barabas.
Here is the best things about the new book. Well, one of the best things, there are two. First, copyright in the United States to the Dracula franchise has been restored to the Stoker family, who haven’t seen much out of the US in the way of royalties due to an early legal oversight.
Second, it’ll make a hell of a movie, and I can see the line of actresses waiting to play Bathory with my mind’s eye. I have my first pick. Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt are careful in that they don’t provide much of a physical description of Dracula at all. They certainly can’t go with the original, which is actually not that far away from the only existing portrait of Vlad III.
Dracula; the Un-Dead; the Sequel to the Original is not as good as the original, but sequels rarely are. This is not to say it’s bad, because it’s not. It’s a very readable, interesting update to the story, not least for its politics, both geo- and gender. It’s also exciting enough to make you keep the pages turning, if you aren’t squeamish.
It may be a bit of a stretch of “poetic license” to have shifted the action of the original from 1893 to1888 specifically in order to bookend the story with Jack the Ripper on the front end and the sailing of the Titanic on the back. I wouldn’t have made that choice but then I didn’t write the book, either.
There is one other choice I would not have made. I don’t particularly like Van Helsing, but I’d have given him a better end.
If you enjoy the vampire genre, you’ll enjoy this book.
I’m not going to go so far as to say that only leCarre could have written this story, although it probably woudn’t have been as good if someone else had.
