Fiction Addict

Genre: Horror

Publisher: Dutton

Released: October 2009

Reviewed by Jonathan Schindler

Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, is a staple in the horror genre. It shows surprising restraint for a horror novel, with the bulk of the action and violence taking place “off-stage” and with letters, telegrams, journal entries, and public documents mitigating the gore and narrating the action. Dracula: The Un-Dead, the authorized sequel by Bram’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker and screenwriter Ian Holt, deviates from Bram’s novel, chronicling in gory detail the trail of violence that naturally follows in the wake of a vampire. Unfortunately, it breaks from Bram’s novel in more than just storytelling method and provides a revisionist account that falls far short of what it seeks to revise.

Dracula: The Un-Dead takes place twenty-five years after Bram Stoker’s Dracula ended. When we last saw the “band of heroes,” they watched as Dracula went up in smoke, thus ending their adventure together. When we find them at the start of Dracula: The Un-Dead, they all in some way bear the mark of their encounter with the enemy, and doubt is cast on their status as heroes. Dr. Seward is dismissed as a madman and a morphine addict. Jonathan Harker is an alcoholic. Arthur Holmwood has withdrawn into his persona as Lord Godalming. Dr. Van Helsing is pursued as a possible Jack the Ripper. Mina Harker, affected by Dracula’s bite, hasn’t aged a day since his death.

Things don’t look good in the heroes’ personal lives, but something far worse begins to happen. One by one, they are hunted down in a manner befitting Dracula. Has their old foe returned for revenge? Or is there a new evil bent on their destruction? And this isn’t their only worry. Young Quincey Harker, Jonathan and Mina’s son, has run away from home to pursue his dream as an actor, under the tutelage of the mysterious Romanian actor Basarab, and he finds himself entangled in a production that hits a little close to home—Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The plot of Dracula: The Un-Dead seems to be interesting and clever enough. It seeks to be historical, drawing in details from Bram Stoker’s life (Bram appears as a character in the book), the Jack the Ripper murders, the sailing of the Titanic, and other timely events. But while its setting may be historical, imported into this gothic environment are all kinds of modern ideas and sensibilities. It’s like the Jonas Brothers showing up in a period piece. Even if they’re wearing period garb, you know they don’t belong.

Most egregious of these snuck-in modern sensibilities is the antagonistic stance the novel takes toward Christianity (and not just the evil character at the center of the book). Each character who claims Christian status, no matter how minor, is deconstructed and cast aside. While such deconstruction may be merited if the stereotype is further explored, Stoker and Holt seem content using stock characters and images. In Bram’s original story, the only symbols able to overcome Dracula were those of Christianity. In Dracula: The Un-Dead, Christian symbols are no longer effective and Jack Seward even dangles the symbols of every religion known to man to try to ward off his foe, which seems to reflect a modern pluralism rather than Bram’s original Gothic setting. The dialogue in many places also seems anachronistic, including bits recorded almost verbatim from soap operas and Star Wars.

In addition to the wrong “feel” of the book, I was also almost offended on behalf of Bram Stoker. That this sequel was given the Stoker family’s imprimatur is baffling, considering how far it goes to reject Bram’s original vision and the unflattering picture it paints of Bram himself. Bram is a cowardly, bitter hack, who copies down what he overhears at a pub. He is sniveling and controlling, and one is almost glad when he is removed from the book. The revisions made for this sequel are justified on the basis of the “inconsistencies” in Bram’s original account. However, the revisions completely set aside the original book, not just those sections deemed inconsistent. It’s as if the sequel guts Bram’s book, taking only what it likes (vampires, gore, and Freudian innuendo) and casts everything else off as worthless. The new picture of Dracula painted by this sequel is nowhere near Bram’s Dracula. Instead of being an evil force that deserves to be hunted and killed, the perpetual damned incapable of good, Dracula is recast as a brooding lover—the Heathcliff/Mr. Darcy/Edward Cullen type—who pines for his lost Mina and is practically sainted by book’s end. (This, however, fails to take into account Jonathan Harker’s terror-stricken journal that begins Dracula, unless this, too, is to be attributed to Bram’s incoherent ravings.) Dracula: The Un-Dead is also far more graphic than the original, both sexually and violently. That Bram achieved an atmosphere of terror with far less of this is to his credit.

Dracula: The Un-Dead is billed as a sequel but is more of an entirely new account. While the premise and the way the accounts are woven together are novel and clever, fans of the original are better served by rereading Bram’s version. It’s shorter, better, and far scarier.