A History in Blood

Back in November, my novel Vampires of the Scarlet Order was a featured novel at the Vampyre Library Book Club hosted by Boutique du Vampyre in New Orleans. I started following the book club before my book was featured and I’ve continued to follow it afterward, though I have to admit that I fell somewhat behind in my reading! Still, I’m glad I’ve continued to follow the club’s activities. The club has featured well known books by major publishers such as Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris and Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker. However, the beauty of book clubs is that they introduce me to great books from smaller presses that I might have missed simply because they don’t have as much distribution. One such book was A History in Blood by Chris DeFazio, which was featured in December.

A History in Blood introduces us to Julian Brownell, an ER doctor in Boston who also happens to be a vampire. The book opens when Julian’s human wife, Lisa, announces that wants a divorce. We soon learn that Lisa has not only been having an affair with her boss, but she’s carrying his baby. Julian decides he’s had enough of playing human and goes to one of his old haunting grounds, New Orleans. Along the way, we learn that Julian actually started life as a Roman soldier. In New Orleans, we meet several vampires who have a shared history with Julian. While all of this is going on, we have two serious situations brewing. A husband and wife team, Helen and Bill Harrison, head up a team of vampire hunters that would give the team from John Steakley’s Vampire$ a run for their money! Helen is known as the Genealogist and she’s found a surefire way to track down vampires and send her strike forces after them. Of course, these vampires include Julian and his friends. The other brewing situation is that Lisa’s boss has uncovered the assets Julian has stashed away over the years and believes Julian has a money-making racket, and he wants in on the action. The great plot and colorful characters propelled me through the book’s pages.

Part of what made this book great is that Chris DeFazio is, himself, an ER doctor. Not only did he bring a certain reality to Julian’s chosen profession at the start of the novel, it’s clear he took time and thought about how vampire physiology would work. He came up with some fascinating reasons why vampires could heal rapidly and live a long time and used those elements well in the book.

Another aspect of the book I appreciated was getting to visit cities I love such as Boston and New Orleans. The New Orleans scenes, in particular, took me back to French Quarter and I enjoyed revisiting such places as Fritzel’s Jazz Club and Jackson Square. In one chapter, Julian visits Martha’s Vineyard. I’ve never been to the Vineyard, but I did live on nearby Nantucket Island for a summer and his portrayal of island life felt authentic to me.

If you want to join me in the Vampyre Library Book Club and discover more cool novels, the club is on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/663608917753704

You can get Chris DeFazio’s novel at Boutique du Vampyre in New Orleans: https://feelthebite.com/collections/vampire-library-books-for-sale/products/a-history-in-blood

While you’re there, don’t forget to pick up a copy of Vampires of the Scarlet Order or Dragon’s Fall: Rise of the Scarlet Order Vampires!

• https://feelthebite.com/collections/vampire-library-books-for-sale/products/vampires-of-the-scarlet-order
• https://feelthebite.com/collections/vampire-library-books-for-sale/products/rise-of-the-scarlet-order

Powers of Darkness

When I read Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker last month, I noticed that the part sections featured epigrams from a Bram Stoker book I’d never heard of before called Makt Myrkranna. It turns out this was the version of Dracula serialized in the Icelandic magazine Falkjonan from 1900 to 1901. The thing is, this isn’t just a translation of Dracula as most of us who discovered it in English know, it’s a completely different version. The title translates as Powers of Darkness and in 2016, Valdimar Asmundsson released an English-language translation of the Icelandic text.

Powers of Darkness

To me, Powers of Darkness reads like an earlier draft of Dracula and that seems to be the conclusion of the translator as well. Some characters have different names. We meet Thomas Harker instead of Jonathan. His fiancee is Wilma instead of Wilhelmina. We meet some new characters such as an old, deaf woman who keeps house for Dracula. There are police investigators in the background, looking into Dracula’s crimes. Instead of Dracula having three brides who tempt Harker, there is a single woman who is presented as Dracula’s niece, who attempts to seduce Harker and feed upon him. Although Harker’s journey to the castle is told in the familiar epistolary format, the events after Dracula leaves his castle in Transylvania become a third-person narrative.

As a writer, I found this version fascinating. It reminded me of the work I did on my novel The Pirates of Sufiro, and I imagine someone who compared the 1994 edition to my recently released 2020 edition would find the new one richer in much the way I would consider Dracula richer than Makt Myrkranna, especially the parts after Dracula goes to England. That part of Makt Myrkranna is very brief compared to Dracula and reads like it was the first time Stoker assembled his notes on various ideas, like a very rough draft. There is also speculation that the original Icelandic publisher thought the novel was running long and the second part ended up being something of a summation, but there are still details in that part missing from Dracula, so one gets a sense that Stoker’s hand was there.

I also found Powers of Darkness interesting because I’m revising my novel Vampires of the Scarlet Order for a new edition. In that case, I’m doing less rewriting than I did for The Pirates of Sufiro, but I am recutting the novel and reordering the chapters a bit to tell the story more effectively. I thought about this a lot while reading Dracul, where J.D. Barker and Dacre Stoker build suspense by starting the novel in a scene where Bram Stoker is facing an unknown enemy behind a door, then going back and telling how he reached that point. In Vampires, I started with a very linear narrative, but now I start in the present and let the past unfold when characters have reason to tell it. I think the new version strengthens the narrative.

One interesting element of Powers of Darkness was that the translator took time to attempt to map out a floor plan of Dracula’s castle based on the description. The result is an interesting look inside the count’s Transylvanian abode. Another thing I thought was interesting in this version was that Dracula holds some kind of dark ritual for his followers, which seems to anticipate scenes that would appear in the Christopher Lee Hammer films of the 1970s.

I would recommend Powers of Darkness to writers wanting to glimpse Bram Stoker’s process, or Dracula fans who want to get more insight into the history of the character. If you’re a casual reader looking to read Stoker for the first time, I’d start with the English language Dracula, or perhaps the collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Stories by Stoker. If you want to learn more about Powers of Darkness and even look at maps of Dracula’s castle, visit: http://powersofdarkness.com/. You can learn more about my novels at http://davidleesummers.com.

Dracul

Last month, I was invited to join the Vampyre Library Book Club hosted by Boutique du Vampyre in New Orleans. The first featured selection was the novel Dracul by Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker. Dacre Stoker is the great grandnephew of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, and the manager of the Bram Stoker estate.

Dracul

The novel Dracul imagines that Bram Stoker was inspired to write his most famous novel by events from his life. It’s known that Bram was a rather sickly child and there were fears he wouldn’t survive to adulthood. Instead, Bram suddenly became very healthy and, in fact, became an outstanding athlete at Dublin’s Trinity College. In Dracul, the authors imagine this happened because the Stoker family nanny was a vampire. After she saves Bram’s life, the nanny, Ellen Crone, disappears. Bram and his sister Matilda follow Ellen to nearby Artane Castle where they find a box of putrid earth. An arm rests in the dirt. On its finger is a ring bearing the inscription, “Dracul.”

The story follows Bram, Matilda, and their brother Thornley as they attempt to solve the mystery of Ellen Crone and “Dracul.” They reach a dead end as children but the mystery returns to haunt them in their 20s and they find more clues, which then lead them to a climactic encounter inspired by Bram’s short story “Dracula’s Guest.” In the afterword, Dacre shares how he has come to know that “Dracula’s Guest” was actually part of the first 100 pages of Dracula excised before publication. I found Dracul to be a thrilling and suspenseful novel and I was delighted to read Dacre’s afterword that explained several of the real life and literary inspirations.

In the afterword, Dacre discusses some of the controversy surrounding the inspiration of the character of Dracula. It’s often taken for granted that Stoker used Wallachia’s Vlad III as the inspiration for his vampire. As Dacre points out, that’s not at all a given and he argues that Bram had in mind a creature who had been living from a time much before the fifteenth century. I found this interesting. Although it has been a while since I read Dracula, I do recall noting that Bram shrouded the origins of the title character in mystery.

Dragon’s Fall

It was partly because of that and partly because my favorite screen Dracula is Christopher Lee, that I decided to explore the idea that the Dracula legend came about because people conflated an ancient vampire with Vlad III. The names Dracul and Dracula come from “the order of the dragon” a chivalric order of knights who fought to defend Christendom. This particular order was founded in 1408 by Sigismund von Luxembourg who was then the King of Hungary. However, there are other knights through the centuries who used dragons as emblems or titles and I imagined the “real” Dracula might be one of them. You can learn the full story of my version in my novel Dragon’s Fall: Rise of the Scarlet Order Vampires. You can find all the places its available at: http://davidleesummers.com/dragons_fall.html. You can find signed copies of Dracul at: https://feelthebite.com/