3. David Thomas Moore, ed. (2018), Dracula: Rise of the Beast

This is a multi-authored novel which I picked up in Whitby when I was there with fellow DracSoc members last September. It's a response to both Stoker's novel and a lot of the wider mythos around it, particularly the life of the historical Vlad III Dracula, and like the original novel it uses an epistolary format (or modern equivalents) throughout. It consists of five main chapters (or dossiers of documents), each dealing with different periods and settings and each with their own individual authors, as follows:

• Bogi Takács, 'The Souls of Those Gone Astray from the Path' - set during Vlad III Dracula's imprisonment in Hungary, this mainly consists of letters between two rabbis, through which we learn how Dracula has been transformed into a vampire with the help of Mátyás Corvinus, and then fakes his own death on campaign in Transylvania and infiltrates the Hungarian court in the person of Mátyás' new wife, Queen Beatrix.
• Adrian Tchaikovsky, 'Noblesse Oblige' - covers the life of Erzsébet Bathory, who is preyed upon as a young woman by Dracula and whose response is to conceive an intensive loathing for him and spend her whole life equipping herself to fight against him by trying to unlock the secret of how to extend and take life from others herself via gruesome experiments. I.e. it is the classic "she hates him so much she becomes like him" narrative.
• Milena Benini, 'A Stake Too Far' - set during the vampire panics of the early 18th century, we follow a doctor sent out to Croatia on the orders of the Empress Maria Theresa to tackle the problem. The twist is that there really are vampires on the prowl in the area - Vlad himself, and his brother Radu, also a vampire and his sworn enemy.
• Emil Minchev, 'Children of the Night' - a single long letter from Vlad Dracula to an associate in London, relating how he is planning to move there to provide sufficient nourishment for his three daughters (the vampire women who live in his castle in Bram's novel), after they have drunk the area around his castle dry. Most of the letter is actually about their mother, a local woman named Yaga whom he discovered had supernatural powers and became his one true love, but who died shortly after giving birth to them.
• Caren Gussoff Sumption, 'The Women' - flipping mainly between the late 1960s and the present day, this tell the stories of Lolo, a descendent of the Szgany who served Dracula before his death, who has come to London to study and nearly becomes a victim of Mátyás Corvinus, and Dani, her trans daughter who is figuring out how to tell her mother who she really is as well as how to take on Corvinus herself.

The five stories are tied together by a framing narrative, in which a Jonathan Holmwood (born in 1947 to judge from his email address) sends Dani (of the last story) a series of files, each with a covering note, consisting of the dossiers of documents which make up the first four stories and which he has gathered himself over a lifetime of research into his own family's brush with Dracula. Given the multiple authorship, I found the collection as a whole surprisingly coherent - and of course an epistolary format featuring completely different characters writing each section helps with that, because of course their voices should sound a bit different anyway. I also really enjoyed the stories overall, both individually and collectively. The historical contexts were extremely well-researched (by which I do not just mean repeating 'facts' from primary sources, but sometimes also interrogating and deconstructing them too), the references to Stoker's novel (and occasionally other related fiction - e.g. golem stories, Le Fanu's 'Carmilla') were clever and well-informed without feeling over-played, there was loads of foregrounding of usually-silenced types of characters (Jews, women, trans people, Romany people), the characterisation generally was strong and absorbing, and the stories were full of intriguing scenarios and details.

However, I did find the fourth story broke my suspension of disbelief a bit. Dracula's true love, Yaga, proves to be a sort of spider-woman - she makes webs, paralyses and devours her prey, and gives birth to their three children in giant eggs, after which she explains that they have to eat her as their first meal, and that in order for them to do so Vlad has to kill her himself with his own bone, having stripped the flesh off his finger to do so. I know it seems silly to be complaining about the unrealism of magical spider-ladies in a novel about vampires, but there it is. She was just a step too far for me, and then it didn't help that in the fifth story, Dracula is just unceremoniously dead (I think we're supposed to understand that the events of Stoker's novel have happened to him between the fourth and fifth chapters), and instead the enemy has become Matthias Corvinus, but the novel ends before any kind of confrontation even with him. So, cool as both Lolo and Dani are as characters, and for all that Dani does get to come out to and be accepted by her mother, any kind of final reckoning - or even meeting - with the big vampire villain is just missing. Maybe there will be a sequel?

4. John Sutherland (2017), Who is Dracula's Father?

This one I think I spotted on Amazon and put on my wish-list for kind family members to buy as a Christmas present. It sets out to answer puzzles and questions raised by Stoker's novel, with the one that really caught me eye being the theory that Quincey Morris is actually a vampire in league with Dracula, based mainly on the fact that he allows Dracula to escape at a couple of crucial points in the action. But on reading I discovered that this theory isn't original to Sutherland - rather, he's picked it up (as he quite freely acknowledges), from another source: Franco Moretti 1983, Signs Taken for Wonders. Much the same was true for most of the book, with many of the sources being blog posts (including several I had already read), while a certain sloppiness of detail betrayed a superficial grasp of the material on the author's own part (e.g. anyone who has a passing familiarity with Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films would know instantly that The Tomb of Ligeia could not have been released in 1982, as he has it).

So, while I appreciate the proper and careful referencing, this is basically a work of synthesis rather than that of a single sharp mind picking carefully over the novel's loose threads. Also, there was no acknowledgement at all of what to me is a crucial difference - that between explanations based on what is there in the text (such as the theory that Quincey may be a vampire), and explanations based on what we know about Stoker and his authorial process (e.g. Why does Van Helsing swear in German? Because Stoker originally conceived of the character as German but later changed him to Dutch, probably based on a combination of characters from Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly). I'm down for both, but they're not the same and I have already read bucket-loads of serious-business books offering the latter. I wanted the fannish story-expanding of the former.

Still, it was a fun book to read, and did include some really interesting insights. I've long been intrigued myself by the following claim of Dracula's, reported by Jonathan Harker in his diary of 8th May:

"Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?" He held up his arms.

There are three things a vampire could mean when he says something like that:

1. The conventional human meaning - I am directly descended from Attila.
2. I myself am Attila
3. I bit Attila and drank his blood during his lifetime

Either of the latter two would have to mean he was far older than Vlad III Dracula, but oddly that possibility seems to have been almost entirely ignored by Dracula commentators. (Not that they are mutually exclusive - an immortal vampire able to walk around in daylight can be multiple different historical figures across the generations.) Sutherland has picked it up, though - and as far as I can tell in this instance on his own initiative. In fact, it's his answer to the titular question of the book - Who is Dracula's Father? He ends up suggesting that Dracula may be a child conceived on the night of Attila's death, which was also his wedding-night to a new wife, which to me is slightly weaker than "I am Attila" or "I bit Attila", but still at least gets something out of the line. Props for that.

Another interesting observation is that

When blood is spilled on the floor, from Seward's arm which Renfield has cut in a maniac moment, he laps it up. Thereafter he seems to know everything that Seward knows. He owns him.

That is, Renfield is able to secure a similar telepathic connection between himself and Seward after drinking his blood to the one which Dracula has with Mina in the same circumstances, even though he isn't a vampire. I'd have to read the relevant parts of the novel again to know if the text really bears out what Sutherland says, but if it does, it sort of suggests something interesting about how Stoker is trying to portray vampirism - that the magical properties of blood-drinking aren't rooted in the condition of vampirism (and thus restricted to the vampire characters), but are to some extent inherent in the blood itself - the blood is the life. What distinguishes vampires from humans then isn't so much a quasi-medical condition of the body, but rather that they have recognised and given themselves over to this knowledge and the power that it brings, which is entirely consistent with what Stoker says about Dracula learning his secrets from the Devil in the Scholomance.

Finally - and I can't believe I didn't notice this one before - Harker leaves Bistritz for Dracula's castle on the eve of St George's Day, which his landlady explains means that at midnight "all the evil things in the world will have full sway". But as Sutherland also points out, Dracula's name means 'son of the Dragon' (as Stoker knew), and St George is famous above all as a dragon-slayer - which is what Jonathan, an Englishman and thus a knight of St George (at one point in the novel, Van Helsing literally calls them 'knights of the Cross') will do at the climax. It's another of Bram's Good vs. Evil dichotomies, as well as an index of Jonathan's character development - from the innocent traveller, out of his depth and at the mercy of supernatural things at the beginning, to the swooping hero, defeating them at the end. Nice.