Stoker Family Values

AP Photo A slasher-flick screenwriter and Bram Stoker’s great-grand nephew have written the first “official” Dracula novel since the 1897 original. Matthew Shaer on the pair resurrecting the Count.

In 1901, Bram Stoker appended a new introduction to the Icelandic edition of Dracula, his most famous novel. The events contained in the book, Stoker deadpanned, were no act of imagination. Not only did the dread count exist historically, but he was still un-dead—his reign of terror was not yet complete.

Stoker, a lifelong student of the theater, loved this sort of metafictional gag. He was a master of the shifting perspective—the whole of Dracula is epistolary, with no third-person narration—and he preferred to leave his books open-ended. (In the final pages of Dracula, the title character is stabbed with a Bowie knife. He melts into a fine Transylvanian dust, but as many scholars have pointed out, the conclusion is tantalizingly ambiguous—to really kill a vampire, you need a wooden stake.)

“My family was always proud of its heritage, but it wasn’t like there was a lot of vampire memorabilia lying around the house,” says Stoker.

A few years ago, a screenwriter named Ian Holt stumbled across the 1901 Icelandic introduction, and decided to write a sequel, picking up where Stoker had left off. “Stoker was ingenious,” Holt told me recently. “He never let the reader escape those diary entries and journals. He worked to make you believe, and in the process, he left so many loopholes in his stories. I thought to myself, ‘Well, I can probably fill those loopholes.’”

Holt started with a simple, provocative conceit: What if Dracula had survived the events of Bram Stoker’s original novel?

Dracula: The Un-Dead. By Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. 432 pages. Dutton Adult. $26.95 Holt, who speaks a thick New York accent, has been writing screenplays for more than a decade. He specializes in thrillers (in one of his scripts, a woman falls in love with her rapist) and low-budget horror flicks, few of which have been produced. IMDB describes his 2005 slasher film Dr. Chopper as the story of five young friends who “run afoul of a group of motorcycle-riding madwomen led by the sadistic, knife-wielding plastic surgeon Dr. Fielding.”

But he is also an amateur historian of some note, and as a younger man, Holt temporarily left New York for Boston, where he befriended the eminent Dracula scholars Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally. (Florescu, famously, claims to be distantly related to Vlad the Impaler, the basis for Stoker’s count.) Holt knew he had the depth of knowledge to write a good Dracula sequel, but he was also a realist; he wasn’t going to get his proposal in front of a major publisher on the strength of Dr. Chopper alone.

He needed a hook, and in 2002, Holt, now 40, began reaching out to members of the Stoker clan, which today is scattered across the United States and lower Canada. He was flatly turned down by Bram’s great-grandson Patrick Stoker, who rightly pointed out the Stoker name had not exactly been treated kindly by the passing of years. (In the ‘30s, the Stokers failed to stop Dracula from slipping into the public domain. The family has since had no artistic control over any Dracula-related works, including the 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula.)

Holt next reached out to Dacre Stoker, a great-grand nephew of Bram’s. Dacre, an affable South Carolina schoolteacher, was born in Canada—he once served as the coach of the Canadian Olympic Pentathlon team—and in the ‘90s, he had drifted south with his family. He was a volunteer with a local search and rescue team, a certified First Aid instructor, a fly-fishing enthusiast, and the executive director of a land trust northeast of Augusta. He was everything, in other words, except for a writer.