Dracul: New Stoker novel brings new blood to vampire genre

The strange early life and dedicated vampire research of Dracula author Bram Stoker has been meticulously researched and recounted, in a new historical horror novel co-authored by one of his modern relatives.

Dacre Stoker is a great-grand nephew of Bram and the manager of the Bram Stoker Estate. He teamed up with bestselling dark thriller writer JD Barker to write Dracul, a prequel.

The pair tell Nine to Noon's Kathryn Ryan the book combines fiction with the researched historical facts about Bram's life.

"I would say at least 60 percent - maybe even a little more - but at least 60 percent is real," Dacre says.

He says that's much like the famous original 1897 novel - which was in part based on detailed research and interest in vampires from cultures around the world.

"Combined with Bram's own strange childhood illness - where I believe he was bloodlet, and traumatised by the stories his mom told him about people being buried prematurely, and on top of that his nanny telling him these great Irish folklore stories of vampires and fairies and banshees and things ... this all came as a perfect storm to Bram Stoker's mind."

Barker says Dacre told him two things when he was first approached to write the book.

"The first was that Bram actually tried to sell it as a true story, and the second fact was that the first 101 pages of the novel were actually cut from the book by his publisher," he says.

"That really rocked me because I'd read Dracula many times and it always started with Jonathan Harker on that train - and to imagine that there were 101 pages that preceded that, that were no longer there, that was absolutely fascinating."

The pair wanted to uncover what was contained in those first 101 pages, combine it with what they knew and could find out of Bram's actual life, and thread through it the same kind of chilling tale as told in the original.

Bram Stoker's strange upbringing 

Barker says certainly the characters in Dracula are based partly on Bram's family.

"Bram actually saying that the people in the story are based on real people, when you start to research his life you start to realise who those people actually are.

"[Bram] in fact feels as if he is Jonathan Harker, 'Mina' is actually his sister Matilda, 'Doctor Seward' is actually his brother Thornley, 'Van Helsing' is actually based on a guy named Arminius Vambery."

Dacre says Bram's early life - including being invalid from birth until age seven - also heavily influenced his personality and stories later on.

"There were a number of doctors in Bram's family … they were treating him for an illness that they didn't understand," he says.

"There's a good chance that a lot of the treatments created more problems than actually helped. Bloodletting - for those who aren't familiar with it - they used leeches to draw the blood out from an individual.

"To help that person recuperate ... they would give them red wine, claret, to try to regenerate the lost blood - which obviously today's world we know that doesn't work - it's got the opposite effect."

Sick, weak, bedridden and facing a variety of treatments, the young Bram was also regaled by his mother of the events taking place in Ireland and the wider world.

"The horrible cholera epidemics, the potato famines, people being buried prematurely."

He also had a nanny from birth, Ellen Crone, who shared her stories of Irish folklore, Dacre says.

"There was also this real vampire scare from the 1700s that was going around Europe that people really believed in many different cultures."

Bram Stoker: Champion athlete, theatre manager and writer

Perhaps being confined indoors for so long also fostered a love in Bram for athletic endeavors: He was a champion at rugby, rowing, gymnastics and athletics.

"Bram was actually a capped rugby player at Trinity College in Dublin, and that's one of the things that really interested me is how does a guy who was an almost invalid for the first seven years of his life recover to … become this champion athlete.

Bram's sickness also seems to have affected his - perhaps rebellious - choice of career.

"He was the only one of the family that was not either a scientist, a doctor or a civil servant," Dacre says.

"His dad didn't want him to take on a theatrical life and do something as frivolous as writing, he wanted him to stick in Dublin castle and be a civil servant."

Bram went on to manage a theatre company, moving to London to work with Henry Irving who would later become the first actor ever knighted.

Dacre says his forebear was very successful in turning the theatre into "the place where the creme de la creme would go and be entertained".

"The roles were more professional, and actors had better behaviour on and off the stage. And, sure enough, in his spare time he wrote books - and one in particular that became something of a force of the world."

Truth or fiction

Dacre says Bram himself told a weekly London newspaper at the time it was published that Dracula was part fact, part fiction.

"He listed off 13 different countries that he had researched at that time in either the British Museum Library or the London Library that had information about real vampire scares."

"He also sets it in Transylvania where he did a lot of research, and there's a lot of research that Bram found that gave us very compelling stories, treatises, that there was serious vampire scares."

He says when they collected all the background sources together, they had "this really strange feeling that Bram was telling us that the story was based in reality."

Barker says one sentence in particular has convinced he and Dacre of the truthfulness of much of the story.

"Bram writes: 'I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight, and I am further convinced that they must always remain to some extent incomprehensible although continuing research in psychology and natural science may in years to come give logical explanation of such strange happenings which at present neither scientists nor the secret police can understand'."

Of course, surely not all of it can be completely true.

"I believe Bram believed there was many people - I mean, hundreds of thousands of people all over the globe - that believed vampires were true," Dacre says, "... and that's who he was really tapping into when he wrote this story."

Barker says he and Dacre wanted to emulate that blending of fact and fiction in their own story.

"We knew that the story that we wanted to tell was in those first 101 pages, and we began going through his notes and anything he left behind.

"We needed to make sure not only that the story flowed but all the research of all the facts - the right places, the way the firearms worked - all those things are things that people notice when they read historical piece of fiction."

The lost journal and other sources

To achieve that, they needed to do some research. They were starting with a good basis of notes and a lost journal of Bram's that Dacre had found.

"When I was doing the research for my first book called Dracula the Undead, one of Bram's great grandsons - who's my cousin, who lives in the Isle of Wight - invited me to come over and look through his collection of things," Dacre says.

"There was this booklet of about 170 pages with 311 entries of not-very-good handwriting ... it was Bram's original thoughts, his ideas, his observations, things he wrote down on a day-to-day basis over an 11-year period that gave me tremendous insight into this man."

They also used Stoker's notes for Dracula that are held in the Rosenbach museum in Philadelphia, but they needed more to find the core of those missing 101 pages.

Thankfully, Barker says foreign language editions in those days were sent for translation directly from the author's desk.

"He didn't want to cut those pages … even though they made him cut certain things from the UK edition for that particular publication, he was able to sneak them back in for the other publications that went out around the world.

"The Icelandic version - when it was translated back to English, the first draft - we found totally different storylines, different characters and a lot of the pieces of those first 101 pages were in there."

The pair also managed to get a look at Stoker's original final manuscript, now owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

"It came down to verifying information that we found," JD says.

"They locked us in a conference room in his office, they took away our cameras and our cellphones, two people stayed in the room with us and just kind of hovered over us to make sure we didn't do anything we weren't supposed to, we had to put gloves on, and we started flipping through this manuscript."

"It's missing the first 101 pages as well - so, he didn't have those - but what we did find were the deleted scenes.

"They couldn't use a computer or anything along those lines so if they did a cut and paste they literally cut a piece of the document out and pasted it somewhere else. When they deleted something all they did was draw a line through it.

"We quickly realised that those deleted scenes referenced the text from those first 101 pages, and that's how we validated our story."

They still don't know the entirety of the missing 101 pages but Dacre says they know the core - at least 17 to 30 pages worth.

As a proof, he and his wife developed a timeline of Bram's life, then they matched it up against the timeline of their story.

"They were very, very similar."

Staying true to the original vision

They wanted to stay as true as they could to Bram's original style and made a "really big, big decision" to write the story in the epistolary style - journals, diaries and letters - just like the original Dracula, Dacre says.

"It really feels like there's three authors on this book, not two," JD says.

"Working with Dacre was ... huge, because he knows the Dracula story inside and out and he knows these people inside and out and he knows Bram's journals and those entries."

"We've got portions of this book that were actually pulled from [Bram's] own words.

He says he also immersed himself in Bram's world to achieve this. 

"I read everything that he wrote, I listened to the audiobook for Dracula on a constant repeat the entire time that we were working on this book and what that allowed me to do was capture his vocabulary, his writing style, his cadence, to the point where I personally couldn't tell the difference.

"When we went through the editing process I had to go back and look - 'was this something that we wrote or something that Bram wrote?' Because obviously we didn't want to correct his grammar or his punctuation, because it was Bram."

He says it was also important to stick with Bram's vision of what a vampire was - not what they've become in modern media.

"In his notes he's got a list of traits that a vampire actually has which he put together after examining vampire legends and lore all over the world.

"Vampires don't sparkle, they're not all Europeans that are beautiful people with perfect accents - those are fun to watch but that's not what the vampire originally was: the vampire was a monster, it was something that took lives that was just horrible.

He says there's nothing wrong with those other takes on it, however.

"I'm sure Bram would probably get a kick out of it, and that it's moved on to that and it's evolved a little bit, but vampires were definitely not new when Bram came around.

"There had been stories told about them before - he just happened to write the one that has stuck with people and has resonated over the years."