Dracula in Love
By Francesca Miller
Meet Karen Essex at Vampire Fest 2010 in New Orleans. More details to follow.
With Dracula in Love, Ms. Essex turns her formidable writing talent to a period closer to the modern era, Victorian England. She has divested the Bram Stoker novel of its epistolary roots and retooled it as a first person memoir. The author makes use of many of the locales and characters from the original work but looks at them through modern eyes. Much of the vampiric story remains, but, as opposed to the Stoker novel, Dracula in Love is a romance, a singularly erotic one at that. The novel was clearly designed for a discerning female audience that enjoys well-written prose along with bodice ripping. Be assured, there are a heaving bosoms and erect male members aplenty, certainly enough to displease please those who see the 1897 novel as simply a work of horror. The literary conceit of Mina as Dracula’s old flame is not a new one but Dracula in Love does it differently. The Count provides an enlightened contrast to the Victorian males alternately attracted to and repulsed by the power of female sexuality. Ms. Essex also revisits the misogynistic undertones of the Stoker version that have intrigued and confounded scholars and amateur Freudians for decades. The Slavic elements are there too, but in a tribute to Bram Stoker’s Irish roots, the author enriches her novel with Celtic legends of shape shifters and demigoddesses. Stoker himself even appears on the pages, ready to purloin Mina’s story for the manuscript that eventually becomes Dracula.
The male characters from the original are present but written with far darker strokes. Dr. Van Helsing is transformed into a German alienist named Von Helsinger who is obsessed with the baser aspects of feminine sexuality. I won’t reveal more, but let us say he’s not your father’s Van Helsing. In recreating Dr. Seward’s asylum, Ms. Essex incorporated case histories taken from the files of Victorian physicians, stories which made me overjoyed to be living in a post-Madonna world.
As noted before, Dracula purists probably won’t be part of the fan base for Dracula in Love and most likely will be put off by the title. Dracula in Love is not for Twilighters. The novel is unapologetically erotic, a frank look at what happened in Victorian bedrooms once the gaslights were turned off; however, admirers of the Gothic undead and those who love unbridled sensuality, adventure and powerful prose will have a new heroine, and her name is Mina.
Francesca Miller for Vampire Fest
