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

[strange_complex]

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?

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