Dracula: The Un-dead [Hardcover]

Dacre Stoker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2009

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Group Canada (2009)
• ISBN-10: 0670069868
• ISBN-13: 978-0670069866
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,404,756 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Let Sleeping Vampires Lie, October 29, 2009

By 

Mark (Yonkers, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dracula: The Un-dead (Hardcover)

If you enjoyed Bram Stoker's original Dracula novel, do NOT read Dacre Stoker's sequel.

Dacre (a grand nephew of Bram Stoker) and Ian Holt searched for the basis of their sequel plot in numerous details, hints, and ambiguities to be found in the text of the original. They say as much in their Afterword. The problem is that the BASIS of the sequel should not be a mere teasing out of details without concern for the direction in which this might take them. Rather, faithfulness to the major premise of the original should have been maintained. But, in that, the two authors failed.

The plot of Dracula is essentially the timeless struggle of Power vs. Moral Goodness. Dracula has superior powers, excessive strength, heightened senses, and other abilities, but he uses these to prey upon other human beings. Van Helsing may not possess the powers of the vampire but his struggle is to protect those on whom the vampire would prey.

Anyone who has ever read Dracula in conjunction with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes canon will recognize the kinship immediately. The Dracula novel is not about the vampire, any more than the Sherlock Holmes literature is about Moriarty, except in a peripheral sense. Its about the good guys.

Van Helsing is no fanatic. He is rather like a Sherlock Holmes figure who is willing to consider the existence of preternatural beings beyond the realm of ordinary human experience. And, because of that, he is the one person best suited to assume leadership in the fight against this particular foe. Like Holmes, Van Helsing has two things available to him to compensate in the otherwise unequal match with Dracula. He has his own considerable intellect, and he has the help of good people courageous enough to stand with him through the dangers that ensue. Jonathan Harker and all the rest are to Van Helsing what Dr. Watson is to Holmes. And, just as Dr. Watson has more than once saved Holmes' skin despite Holmes' tendency toward overconfidence, it is Jonathan Harker and the rest who enable Van Helsing to accomplish what he could not have done alone. This is what gives the original Dracula novel its drive, and what readers like myself have always found so satisfying about it.

Every bit of this is turned on its end by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt. Dacre and Holt rightly point out Dracula's superior abilities, but they go to great lengths to downplay, if not outright excuse, his evil. They flirt with the idea that a vampire represents some type of Ubermensch or Superman, who, with the aid of the vampire virus, is able to use the full extent of their human brain capacity. As they present it, Dracula is the misunderstood "good" vampire battling "for God" against Battory the evil vampire (and some unnamed mentor -- another sequel in the works?) for possession of the world. Dracula only drinks the blood of humans because he has to in order to survive, and then only victimizes murderers, rapists, etc. ("just desserts" as it were). Lucy and Mina were not victims but objects of love.

If I can interject an interesting recent parallel: In 2002, H.G. Wells' great grandson Simon Wells directed an updated version of The Time Machine, another roughly Victorian era novel. In the update, the ruler of the Morlocks was portrayed as an evolved human with superior abilities like Dracula. Up until the penultimate scene, there is the question of why the Morlocks prey upon the Eloi as food when there are clearly other options. In the scene, the Time Traveller, fighting on behalf of the Eloi, finally confronts the ruling Morlock and makes it an open question. The Morlock's response is "Who are you to question two million years of human evolution?" In other words, he doesn't even want to consider any other options, despite his ostensibly superior intellect. At that moment, with that admission, the Morlock ruler loses any vestige or pretense of having a moral stance. And with that, the moral high ground shifts unambiguously to the Time Traveller and his struggle on behalf of the Eloi against Evil.

Much the same can be said of the Ubermensch vampire in the Dracula sequel. If the price to overcome death and evolve beyond the ordinary human state is to become a bloody killer of other human beings, then he has lost any real moral justification he may ever have had. The fact that he fights against a greater evil in the form of Battory in the sequel only ameliorates the degree of his own evil. It does not exonerate his evil by any means. Yet unlike the updated Time Machine movie, the Dracula sequel does not allow the humans to maintain the moral high ground.

At the same time that Dacre and Holt attempt to enhance Dracula's humanity through his self-justifying apologetics, they go to great lengths to diminish the humanity of Van Helsing, Harker, and the others. All are reduced in the sequel to post-Freudian psychological case studies of one sort or another, rather than healthy, mature adults. None of them is free from some viscious vice, none retains much moral integrity, and all meet horrible ends. Sadly, because these people are no longer very likable, all their angst fails to touch a sympathetic chord in the reader. Even in portraying Bram Stoker himself as a character in the sequel, Dacre cannot generate any empathy for his grand uncle. Yes, in the Sherlock Holmes canon, Holmes is subject to bouts of depression and drug addiction, but he is never reduced so abjectly as are Dacre and Holt's characters because Holmes never really loses his moral compass or his will to go on fighting. And no reader of Dracula, Holmes, or The Time Machine ever wanted the protagonists to be dragged into the mud, just so we could listen to Dracula, Moriarty, or the Morlock give us their harangues on why they are not really evil after all.

Having said all this, I will conclude by telling you the main reason why you should not read this sequel. It's because the sequel will spoil your memories of the original. As the hipe in the book itself states, there are other Dracula books out there. There are plenty of Sherlock Holmes sequels, and even some Time Machine sequels. Some sequels are better than others. A few may even live up to the originals. But, for better or worse, most are at least tolerable. But Dacre and Holt's Dracula sequel does something that most others do not. It raises your expectaction that this is "THE" sequel, not only through the use of a Stoker name for authorship, but also by paying such close attention to minute details and elaborating on those, as mentioned at the beginning. This gives you the illusion that this really is the rest of the story. Which is why the mean-spirited treatment in the sequel of the characters who were heroic in the original is so depressing. Even the way that Dacre and Holt refer to them as "the band of heroes" in the sequel has a decidedly sarcastic tone in its use, even if unintentional.

So do yourself a favor. Read the original. If I'm not mistaken, there is a good copy out called Dracula: The Definitive Edition, edited by Edward Gorey, with a foreward by Marvin Kaye, that even restores "Dracula's Guest" to its rightful place at the beginning of Bram Stoker's novel. Don't let Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt spoil the original for you.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't bother........., November 20, 2009

By 

Mary T. Mcdonough "Transylvanian" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dracula: The Un-dead (Hardcover)

Dracula the Undead was a huge disappointment. The writers should have just spit on the original classic- it would have been easier and saved me some money. If you take the 1992 Dracula film, cross it with the Blade films, add a twist stolen straight out Star Wars, you'll have this novel. The writing is that of a science fiction B movie. If you want to read a really great vampire novel, read Steven Koontz's Last Rites of the Vampire and skip Dracula the Undead.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible "sequel" to Stoker classic, October 30, 2009

By 

S. Phillips (Las Vegas, NV United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dracula: The Un-dead (Hardcover)

I was looking forward to reading a sequel to Bram Stoker's classic novel written by one of his descendants; but it's just awful; an insult to the original. Bram would NOT be amused. Neither will you if you are a fan of the orignal novel.

There have been several other sequels already; all far better than this mess. Read "Mina" or one of the others (one even has the same title!) instead; as Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt have unleashed a cliche ridden, gory mess of a novel on the public.