Dacre Stoker and Dracula the Un-Dead
If anyone had told me that a sequel to Dracula was to be written, I would have fallen off my stool. Surely, it would be a sacrilege! Bram's own novel, The Lair of the White Worm (1912), written just before his death, is believed by many historians to be his own attempt at a sequel to what became his most famous work. Lair is interminably unreadable these days, describing mind-numbing imagery that could only come from a warped subconcious at best. Like his short tales, this would become almost obsolete.
But Bram had ideas of his own for the Count's rejuvenation. In his original manuscript for Dracula, he deleted the sequence at the end that explains the exploding of the Count's castle to smithereens. Dracula himself had been killed by two hunting knives and not the official stake through the heart. There are many hints throughout the book that Mr. Stoker had decided that Dracula should live again!
Over the ensuing years, Dracula would be given a new lease of life through the stage play of Hamilton Deane. Nosferatu, the 1922 silent movie by FW Murnau, had already pricked public consciousness as it related a story about a vampire invading Germany. An eight year long legal battle followed as Florence Stoker sued the makers, Prana Films, for infringement of copyright on Dracula. Mrs Stoker won her case and all copies of Nosferatu were ordered to be destroyed.
Mr. Deane's play, however, did incredibly good business as it toured the United States for almost three years and was opted for filming in 1930 by Universal pictures. The film made an international star of an unknown Hungarian expatriate, Bela Lugosi, and formed an iconic picture of the Count in everyone's mind for years to come. In the 1950s, Christopher Lee at Britain's Hammer Film Studios would share a similar fate to Mr. Lugosi by becoming almost inseparable from his screen incarnation of Count Dracula.
Images were impossible to show of the Count if they didn't resemble Messrs Lugosi and Lee.and books about vampires didn't really begin to surface in volume until the mid-1980s inaugurated by the immensely popular John Badham film starring Frank Langella. While the John Badham film starring Frank Langella flopped at the cinema, vampires were rising in the literary ranks with major works by Stephen King ('Salem's Lot), Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire), John Skipp & Craig Spector (The light at the End), Whitley Streiber (The Hunger)), George R R Martin (Fevre Dream), F. Paul Wilson (The Keep) and Robert R McCammon (They Thirst). But the Count was conspicuously absent as these stories invented new bloodsucking characters written by fans of the genre and designed to cater to the new wave of cinema goer. Robert Lori had penned a short series in the vein of thrilling adventure stories with eye-catching titles, Dracula Returns, Dracula's Gold and Dracula's Lost World among others.
Off the top of my head, I can only pin point the Dracula Tapes novels of Fred Saberhagen as actually using the Count as a central figure in his stories. The three novels by Peter Tremayne, Dracula Unborn (1977), The Revenge of Dracula (1978) and Dracula, My Love (1980) concentrated on three separate tales concerning The Count and added a wealth of historical detail from his days as Vlad Tsepesh. In the 90s, after Francis Ford Coppola gave us Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), there were numerous collected editions of short stories that edited into an examination of Dracula's adventures after the novel. But no real novel that qualified in any respect as an actual sequel to Stoker's original story.
Only Kim Newman had utilized his incredible knowledge of pop-culture to create Anno Dracula (1991), a 'what if...' sequel that had Dracula winning out over his enemies from Stoker's tale and becoming consort to Queen Victoria. Mr. Newman has carried this continuing thread through three more novels, but a direct sequel to Bram's tale was still a concept that would be unheard of...until 2009.
Dacre Stoker was born in Montreal, Canada, 23rd August 1958. He studied Education and Physical Education at University in the United States. He participated in the sport of Modern Pentathlon for 15 years, first as an athlete and eventually a coach in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. For 22 years he has been a school teacher in Physical Education and Health Science. He teaches CPR and First Aid and is also a Director of a Land Conservation organization. It is perhaps fitting that Dacre Stoker should write the official sequel to Dracula as he is the great grandnephew of Bram Stoker himself.
With over at least 600 film variations and fourteen major works on the Bram Stoker novel themselves, Dacre confesses in his afterward to Dracula The Un-Dead that:-
"After the film deal with Universal (studios), it came to light that for some reason Bram had not complied with one small requirement of the U.S. copyright office, therefore rendering Dracula public domain in the United States since 1899."
As is mentioned above, the Dracula image has been sold and reused thousands of times since the novel's publication with the Stoker Estate never receiving a penny. Dacre:-
"..felt that it was important for the Stokers to somehow lay claim to the character of Dracula as he was more and more embraced by popular culture."
But it wasn't until many years after College that his thoughts would come to fruition with the meeting of screenwriter, Mr. Ian Holt. Mr. Holt is obsessed with all things Dracula and initiated the idea that the Count could be returned to the Stoker family in a very simple way...Dacre Stoker should write the sequel.
Dracula The Un-Dead picks up the story twenty five years after the Count has been destroyed in Transylvania and concentrates on the adventures of Quncey Harker, the son of Jonathon and Mina Harker. In a tale steeped in authenticity, there are also many references to pop culture and a gallery of villains and heroes that the fans can easily warm to.
Dracula The Un-Dead could be read as a separate novel altogether from it's famous prequel as the original tale is only alluded to very sparsely in its pages.
Gone is the epistolary rendering of letters and timetables as they were deemed outdated concepts today. The story is told in the third person with historical detail so accurate that Dacre brought in a third person in the form of Alexander Galant to reconstruct the Victorian period in which the tale is set.
As Mr. Stoker and Mr. Holt juggled day jobs, they shared writing chores and Dacre visited the Rosenbach Museum and studied his great grand uncle's notes on the original novel. They added characters that Bram had dropped from his own narrative and expanded views on the vampire that would resonate with the fans in today’s world. This Herculean and very admirable task was accomplished in six years and I leave it for the fans themselves to judge as to it's worth as a sequel to Bram's own story, or as an independent vampire rehash on an old tale.
For myself, I admire Mr. Stoker's efforts in his bid to reclaim at least part of a legacy that should have remained in his family from the outset. After all, Dracula is in his blood.
Charles E. Butler. England 2010. Author of The Romance of Dracula; a personal journey of the Count on celluloid.
