I come in pieces
The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen (1975)
Fred Saberhagen is best known for his "Berserker" sci fi short stories, his "Book of Swords" gods-and-fantasy series, and his "Faces of the Gods" science-looks-like-magic series.
His Dracula books came in the 1970s and 1980s. The first was The Dracula Tape, published in 1975 (a year before Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire).
Saberhagen had deconstructed Greco-Roman myths extensively for a number of his Berserker stories.
In 1972, Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally published In Search of Dracula. Their nonfiction book attempted to discover the historic and legendary elements which Bram Stoker relied on for Dracula. They were the first to claim that Stoker based his vampire on the historic figure of Vlad Ţepeş.
Saberhagen read their book and found it intriguing. He then re-read Dracula, and realized that the novel made for a good re-telling.
Saberhagen's vampire novels are based on the premise that vampires are like human beings: They have the power to do good or evil; it is their choice.
The Dracula Tape is the story of Bram Stoker's Dracula told from Dracula's point of view. It is part horror novel, part comedy.
Saberhagen depicts Dracula as the historical Ţepeş. After defeating the invading Turks, he is assassinated and becomes a vampire (although he is uncertain how that happened). Most vampires in Saberhagen's novels are created when a human drinks the blood of another vampire. Ţepeş chalks it up to a supreme act of will on his part, but that is scoffed at by others.
The novel begins with Mina Harker's great-grandson and his wife making out in a car on a foggy, deserted English moor. Dracula bursts in on them, and insists on telling them the "true story" behind what happened. They capture his tale on a tape recorder.
In Dracula's version, Jonathan Harker, Abraham Van Helsing, Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood are pretty much bungling fools.
Jonathan Harker, for example, is a terrified mouse of a man who believes everything in the world is the work of the Devil. A wolf must be a werewolf. A woman in a black hat must be a witch. A fox crying in the night must be a banshee.
Dracula is genuinely trying to pass as human, and invites Harker to his castle as a means of seeing whether he could do so. He just underestimated how difficult it would be. When Harker cuts himself while shaving, Dracula responds by practically mooning over the blood and lauding it like a fine wine. Harker thinks Dracula has an insatiable and uncontrollable desire to drink his blood.
Harker repeatedly interprets everything in the worst possible way. That wasn't a baby in a sack Dracula threw to his three brides but a squealing pig. The wolves at the castle door weren't there to prevent him from leaving, but in fact to escort him safely to the main road. When the rusty hinges of the main door of the castle prevent exit, Dracula climbs down the wall to find a repairman.
Van Helsing is sacrilegious, manipulative, and not as knowledgeable about vampires as he believes himself to be. "Imbecile is one of the most charitable names that I can find for him," Dracula says. A failure at medicine, he began making up stories about vampires so that credulous young people would admire him. Trapped by his lies, he has to hunt vampires with groups of acolytes in tow or be exposed as a charlatan.
Dracula himself is no saint. He is ill-tempered and violent, but also has a strong sense of honor and loyalty.
The main plot of the novel involves Dracula's ill-fated voyage to England, where vicious storms sweep most of the crew overboard. Once in Whitby, Dracula falls for the lovely Lucy Westenra. Van Helsing botches a blood transfusion, giving her the wrong blood type and killing her. Dracula then meets Mina Harker, and they fall in love.
Vampire-on-tape sounds a lot like Anne Rice. Her book did come out a year later, but she'd had the same idea in the 1960s. Just coincidence.