Dracul By Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker

 Dracul

By Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker

So Dacre Stoker is Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew, because of this and the exhaustive research he did before putting pen to paper, the Stoker estate has granted Dacre's books official status. That's right, this book is officially part of the canon, the expanded Dracula universe if you will (Oh God.). Now Interesting enough Dacre did not grow up a horror fan or steeped in family lore. In fact, Dacre, a Canadian American born in 1958, only found out he was related to Bram because the other children kept making jokes about getting blood instead of candy from his home during Halloween. This is because it was a family policy that while they were proud of Bram Stoker's accomplishment, they didn't want to feel beholden to it and family members should make their own way. Dacre certainly did so, becoming a member of the Canadian men's pentathlon team and coaching the team at the 1988 Summer Olympics. It wasn't until a meeting with screenwriter Ian Holt that Dacre felt the urge to start writing in his great granduncle's sandbox, this led to the authorized sequel of Dracula the Un-dead in 2009. However, Dacre found things that made him believe there was more work to be done. JD Barker on the other hand is an internationally bestselling American author of suspense thrillers. He was born on January 7, 1971, in Lombard Illinois. He got his start as a ghostwriter and book doctor helping other authors get their works squared away for publication. In 2014 he released his first novel, Forsaken, which utilized the character of Leland Gaunt of Stephen King's Needful Things. Mr. Barker had managed to get Mr. King's permission for this and had honestly done a good job. He did such a good job that Forsaken won one of the Bram Stoker Awards, in this case, Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Which led to the Stoker family reaching out to him to help with a more ambitious project then even a sequel to Dracula.

The story of the creation of the Dracula novel is one surrounded by rumor and swirling half-myths. Dracul finds it's starting point in the fact that in the first draft that Bram Stoker submitted, the opening line is a four-word sentence “This story is true.” The first draft was so upsetting that the publisher's response was a single word. No (I should think so, in Victorian England!). They believed that publishing the first draft of Dracula, especially presenting it as a true story would only cause panic and upset. London at the time was still reeling from the Whitechapel murders and the last thing the editors wanted to suggest to the good people of England who already were in the grip of terror of Jack the Ripper was there was a second supernatural monster roaming about after their blood (That’s a bit odd honestly.  Yes, Jack The Ripper was ascribed supernatural powers by a few, but most believed him a garden variety mortal.  Penny Dreadfuls were very common in those days, and people were accustomed to… badly written pulp horror.  Honestly, this stinks to me of disdain for the good sense of the working class. {Well it was Victorian England}). For months Stoker and the Editors dueled and many changes were made, the title originally to be “The Un-Dead” was changed to Dracula and strangely enough the first 102 pages were supposedly cut from the novel entirely (Huh..). This was confirmed when a manuscript of an early draft was found and the page number 103 was crossed out and the number 1 put in its place. It’s believed that a small part of those missing pages was reworked into the short story Dracula's Guest published by Bram's widow Florence in 1914 but the rest seemed lost to history. Mr. Stoker and Mr. Baker working from notes, journals, and letters by Bram and others attempted to reconstruct those missing pages and build a new story from them. It's also noted that they borrowed a bit from a book that we'll be reviewing later, Powers of Darkness, which claims to be based on an earlier draft of Dracula itself. One that in a lot of ways challenges the conventional wisdom of the novel; for example rejecting completely that Dracula is based on Vlad Tepes. Although Dracul does suggest that the vampire comes from the same family line as Vlad Tepes, instead suggesting that the vampire is older than the historical Vlad and comes by his powers through darker dealings. The book also steps back into earlier vampiric lore, instead of sunlight destroying them for example, they are simply rendered powerless and can be overpowered by mortal men (Yeah the sunlight destruction thing is relatively new.). To be honest, I like this idea as it provides more dramatic opportunities for the vampire and the heroes to meet face to face without having to explain how the vampire fails to just overwhelm everyone. Other weaknesses stay, however, such as the inability to cross running water, the intense reaction to garlic, and the lack of a reflection in the mirror. Dracul was published in 2018 and remains Mr. Stoker's most recent book.

Dracul also avoids the main characters of the novel Dracula, although one of them does make an appearance towards the end of the book. Instead, Dracul uses real people, most specifically Bram Stoker himself and his family. The narrative builds on real events that happened to the Stoker family, for example, Bram was afflicted with an unknown illness as a child and often left him unable to walk until he was 7 years old; by the time he was 20 however, Stoker would be a celebrated athlete. However later in life, Stoker faced a sudden decline which has been explained as a series of strokes or tertiary syphilis (The gift that keeps on giving.). It's Bram's childhood illness that is the inciting incident of this novel, however, as his condition worsens and only his nanny Ellen Crone seems capable of treating it. However, every time she embarks on the treatment she must flee the family home for days. Bram finds himself being pulled into a mystery to discover just who this woman is and what is her role in his recovery and continued good health. Strangely enough, after his good health is seemingly restored Ellen disappears, at first it seems for good but nothing lasts forever. However, Bram is not the motivating character in this investigation, instead, he is pushed and pulled into it by his much bolder and inquisitive sister Matilda Stoker. Where Bram is a good storyteller and writer, Matilda is a talented artist even in her childhood; and she’s deeply frustrated by her inability to draw, paint, or otherwise capture Ellen Crone's likeness on paper (Ooooh okay, that is pretty cool.). Each work comes out as a fairly similar but obviously different woman no matter what Matilda does. This drives her to start digging into just who Ellen is and when she sees Ellen in Paris years after Ellen's disappearance it sets Matilda on the scent of the mystery again. This means that she will pull in her dear brother Bram whether he likes it or not. It's Matilda's desire to know what the hell is going on that starts the plot but it's Bram's complicated and interdependent relationship with Ellen that keeps the plot going. Nor are Bram and Matilda the only two of the Stoker family pulled into this, as their elder brother Thornley is also pulled into it almost against his will, due to the affliction plaguing his wife Emily (God it’s like Ellen is some kind of vampiric Rasputin…). The Stokers find themselves asking, just what is going on here, how much of it is related and how over their heads are they? They'll have to recruit allies of their own such as the Hungarian adventurer Arminius Vambery, who has a wealth of knowledge and experience that he keeps hidden. This ends up begging the question of whether they can trust Vambery any more than they can trust the creatures of darkness that are hounding them?

Mr. Stoker and Mr. Barker choose to tell their tale through journal entries and letters written in the first person (Interesting choice. A bold move, if you will.  That kind of structure is hard to pull off so if the author manages it, fantastic! {I should note that the original Dracula novel uses that same format to great effect}). They also ramp up the suspense by framing the childhood investigations between scenes of Bram Stoker being besieged by unknown dark forces both from without a desolate tower and within a locked room inside the tower (“You might be wondering how I got here…” This would lend itself to a fourth wall breaking TV adaptation.). So even as you ask, who is Ellen Crone, what is her interest in the Stoker family, and how is she affecting Bram's health? You're asking, what is Bram doing in that tower, what is he trying to keep in the tower and what is he trying to keep out? The story moves to deal with the Stokers as adults, coming to realize that their brush with the occult and unseen powers of the world in their childhood was not a one-time event but a prelude to a grim struggle against something dark, powerful, vast, and filled with hate and contempt for them (“But we didn’t do anything to them!  We were eight!”). They don't know the players, they don't know the rules of this game, but they already know that losing will cost them more than their lives, it could end up costing them their very souls. Mr. Stoker and Mr. Barker do a great job keeping the vampires mysterious and dangerous while giving them an allure and showing the kind of strange relationships that can evolve between an undead creature with a mind of its own and a human being. The first half of the book is a slow burn that unspools a series of mysteries, where the answers only leave bigger and darker questions behind. This is done fantastically and you're left with a feeling of satisfaction and interests as the mystery is slowly revealed in all its glory. The second half of the book is a lot more frenetic in its pace as the characters hurtle towards their final confrontation with their enemies.

This leads to the two complaints I have with the book. The biggest one being the relationship between our title character and antagonist, and Ellen Crone. It's the shallowest relationship in the book and that's a problem for me because that relationship is what is driving Dracul's actions in the book! I also feel like it makes our title villain rather petty and shallow and honestly, I hate that (Could just be the framing, you know.  Unless you get the antagonist’s perspective in a journal entry, the viewpoint characters might not actually know what’s going on, so you get an unreliable narrator thing going on.{Fair point but I gotta go off what I see in the text!}). There's room for petty and shallow villains, I just don't think Prince Dracula, lord of the night and king of vampires should be one of those! It also stands out because Ellen's relationship with almost every other character in this story is multifaceted and rather deep. I'm purposefully avoiding details to avoid spoiling the book for you but I was left feeling that Dracula had been diminished by this. The second complaint is that the frenetic pace of the second half while allowing for several great action scenes and confrontations means that we don't get to spend too much time with the title character! Perhaps this is because this is envisioned as a prelude that works in tandem with Dracula the novel but if you're reading this on its own then it's a bit maddening. Because at the end of the book, I'm not sure what Dracula was really expecting to get out of his plan other than hurting people who hadn't done anything to him. Maybe that's enough motivation but for me, it falls flat. This could be a personal flaw though folks so I'm not going to dwell on it too much.

On the balance, though I really enjoyed what I read here, the novel works well to support the events in Dracula without undercutting them or the characters of that story. This is a good story, with a villain whose motivations just don't make sense for me as a person but that doesn't make it unrealistic or bad. So keep that in mind when you see my grade. This can be a difficult balancing act to pull off especially writing an addition to the story 120 years after its publication. Meanwhile, it provides us with another look into the world of nighttime predators that stalk humanity's imagination. I usually have mixed feelings about dragooning historical figures into what is essentially a fantasy novel, if only because of the sheer violence that is usually done to the historical person's character. Here however Mr. Stoker and Mr. Baker showed a great deal of care and understanding even while taking what I hope are some liberties with their life events. Still, it makes you wonder about those first 4 words, doesn't it? Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker gets a B+ from me. Go ahead and give it a look, I think you'll enjoy it.

So this book was voted for by our ever-wise patrons, whose ranks you can join for as little as a dollar a month.  That dollar gets you a chance to vote on upcoming book reviews, discuss theme months and vote for them.  Higher levels get other bonuses but to see those you can visit  https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads Hope to see ya there.  Next week!  We get to the main event!  The novel that started it all, Dracula by Bram Stoker, be there or be tossed into a pit with the hungry wolves!  Additionally a review of the 1992 Dracula film!  A special guest review!  Until then folks, keep your garlic up, your stakes sharp and as always, Keep Reading! 

Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen 

White text is your reviewer Garvin Anders