Prequel, tribute, pastiche : "Dracul" by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker

"Dracul" by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker

Prequel, tribute, pastiche 

All fiction – and supernatural fiction especially so – requires us to suspend our disbelief and to accept that the world between the covers of a book is as real as the one we’re living in (if not more).  The premise of Dracul however is even harder to swallow than the very existence of the Undead – the novel presents us with a Bram Stoker who has personal experience of vampires and who has a final showdown with none other than Count Dracula himself.  The concept intrigued me even whilst setting alarm bells ringing in my head – would Dracul turn out to be the great Dracula prequel touted by the marketing blurbs or just another in a recent tradition of horror mash-ups?  The fact that the novel is jointly credited to Dacre Stoker (Bram’s great-grand nephew) and horror writer J.D. Barker only fuelled my misgivings.  Apart from my irrational prejudice against co-authored works, the Stoker name on the title page gave me a niggling suspicion that it was there primarily to capitalize on the link to Bram.   And so, with some difficulty in setting aside pre-conceptions, uncertainties and pet peeves, I joined a youngish Bram keeping watch in an unnamed tower, eyes fixed on a heavy door behind which untold horrors lurk...

I must say that the initial chapters did little to shake off my doubts .  The shifts between Bram’s vigil (helpfully marked “NOW”) and his recollections of his sickly childhood, nursed by the enigmatic “Nanna Ellen”, seemed artificial, the dialogue between Bram and his sister Matilda unconvincing.     However, once this backstory was set out and the action shifted closer to the (novel’s) present, I became increasingly engrossed.  Like Bram’s original, Dracul follows a group of improvised vampire-busters on a hunt which leads them to the dark heart of Continental Europe.  The pace of the plot mounts inexorably and culminates in a set-piece in a ghost-village outside Munich which seems to be as much inspired by horror movies and zombie tropes as by ‘traditional’ vampire fiction.  

 

Part of the fun of the book lies in looking for the parallels between this novel and the original, as well as references to real life events and figures.  Thus, as in Dracula, Dracul is recounted through a series of journal entries, diaries and letters, giving the text an immediacy and allowing for different perspectives.  There is material which is clearly gleaned from the short story Dracula’s Guest and expanded to fit the plot.  The novel also has its own Van Helsing, in the shape of Arminius Vámbéry, a Hungarian Turkologist who, in reality, was an acquaintance of Stoker and might have influenced or served as a model for Van Helsing.  Rather than a prequel to Dracula, I’d consider it more of a companion piece – a “pastiche”, in a positive sense, which delights in resurrecting vampire tropes largely shaped by Bram Stoker’s seminal novel.

In an afterword to Dracul, Dacre Stoker explains that this novel is based on his ancestor’s actual notes and on the first hundred-or-so pages of the novel which were allegedly excised at the insistence of the original publishers.  Then, Stoker ups the ante – Bram, he tells us, presented the manuscript as a “true story” and Dracula was not meant to serve as ‘entertainment’ as much as a warning against a very real evil.  Now, of course, Dracula was neither the first nor the last Gothic novel to present itself as a “non-fictional” account.   Presumably, Dacre is riffing on this trope.  But this does raise an interesting question – namely just how far is Dracul actually inspired by Bram’s biography, handwritten notes and “original intentions” and how much of it is Dacre’s and J.D. Barker’s own invention?  Scholars of the Gothic might illuminate us – in the meantime, Dracul remains an enjoyable vampire romp which nicely complements the (unbeatable) original.

Published October 2nd 2018 by Putnam
      October 18th 2018 by Bantam Press

***

Tales of the Transylvanian Count led me to look up some classical music with links to the region.... or to the undead.    When night creatures are around, An Evening in Transylvania is not really recommended – but listening to some Bartók can never do any harm:

In 1593, obscure Italian composer Girolamo Diruta's published a treatise in two parts on organ playing, counterpoint, and composition. He called it Il Transilvano (The Transylvanian) and dedicated it to Sigismund Bathory, Prince of Transylvania.  Here’s one of the didactic pieces from this collection. The same Bathory Family gave us serial killer Elizabeth often cited (on slim grounds) as another inspiration for the figure of Dracula

The horror, the horror… and the comedy.  Joseph Horovitz’s Horrortorio, written for the farcical Hoffnung Festival sets a comedic horror text to a pastiche of Handel’s oratorios.

Finally, Wojciech Kilar’s soundtrack to Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” – one can never go wrong with this…