Stoker Family Values

“Our main goal was to get back to the basics,” Stoker says. “To give Dracula back to the fans. To return to the story that started it all. I know people will say we’re jumping on the bandwagon with the book—that it’s a case of a relative trying to cash in. But we’ve been at this for years. Since the very beginning of the vampire groundswell.”

Leslie S. Klinger, a Los Angeles tax lawyer and the editor of The New Annotated Dracula, which was published by Norton last year, says that in many ways, Stoker and Holt have written a “fine, exciting” book.

But The Un-Dead, Klinger argues, “lacks the powerful sense of creeping horror present in the original… It’s an interesting story about new characters with old names, but it’s such a massive distortion of the original material that it’s hardly fair to term it a sequel.”

More pressing still is the question of how young aficionados of, say, The Vampire Diaries, will respond to The Un-Dead. In Holt and Stoker’s world, vampires are not sex symbols. They’re serial killers. They gleefully bathe in fresh entrails; they rip the limbs off human bodies like a gourmand digging into a fresh lobster. Impalements, apparently a preferred pastime for Victorian basement-dwellers, occur routinely.

But Stoker says he’s already been mobbed by Dracula fans at conventions, who have found something comforting in the count’s “official” return. “Does this obsession with vampires ever really go away?” Stoker said. “Vampires suited gothic literature; they suited modern literature. There’s something about vampires that appeals to us. The mystery. The intrigue. The romance. That theme of immortality. It’s tremendous escapism, and hey, times are tough.”

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Matthew Shaer writes regularly about books for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Bookforum, among other publications.

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