Vampires have always fascinated me, and Dracula in particular. I remember being super excited for the Frank Langella version and walking away disappointed. It wasn't scary, just slow. So the appetite was always there for something that actually delivered, which Bram Stoker's Dracula did for me in 1992, but that's another post. I meant to pick up Dracul when it first came out in 2018, then forgot about it entirely until recently. Decided to give it a try. It did not disappoint.
The book is written by Dacre Stoker, Bram's great-grandnephew, and J.D. Barker. The premise is that Bram Stoker didn't just write Dracula, he lived through the events that inspired it. The novel is his origin story, more or less. A young Bram and his siblings are raised by a mysterious nanny named Ellen who keeps strange hours, never eats, and seems to be keeping something from the family. Things get darker from there, and eventually Bram crosses paths with the Count himself.
Just like the original Dracula, the whole thing is built in epistolary format: diary entries, letters, journal fragments. It leans hard into Gothic tropes, and I mean hard. Fog, crumbling estates, things moving in the dark, dread that builds slowly. If that's not your thing, this book is going to test your patience. The first act takes a while to get going. But once it does, it's a genuinely fun ride. The authors know what they're doing with the atmosphere, and having Bram Stoker as a character inside his own mythology is a clever hook that the book earns rather than just coasts on.
It's not a reinvention of anything. It's a Gothic vampire novel that plays the genre completely straight and does it well. Sometimes that's exactly what you want.
Recommended.
