Bloodsuckers

The leeches in Hollywood aren't the only ones who can't leave well enough alone, it seems. Bram Stoker's great-nephew thinks he has "a little bit [of his ancestor's skills] in the bloodline"; so little that he has collaborated with a historian, screenwriter and member of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula to perpetrate an "authorised sequel" to his great-uncle's book. Whatever its merits and flaws, Dracula was at least written by a real writer, who had published novels and stories before it and continued to do so after; one of Stoker's later books, The Jewel of Seven Stars, rivals Dracula in quality and impact, especially with its original, unhappy ending. The sequel, co-written by an ex-sports coach who has a famous bloodline to plunder, reeks of stolen life. Stoker's book was set in the present day, with references to Kodak and use of a phonograph diary; the sequel is set in 1912, at a good safe distance. Avoiding the original's epistolary form so as not to confuse "a modern thriller readership", and featuring the obligatory clunk of postmodernism-for-the-masses in the appearance of Bram Stoker himself as a character, it has sold for over a million dollars to three major publishing houses, and shooting of the film version is scheduled for next June, four months before the book comes out. Hence, say the screenwriter and the great-nephew, "we were able to give [Bram Stoker] back his legacy - reclaim Dracula for his roots" - those roots which have been so cruelly sucked dry by profitable films and spinoffs. "Maybe even more important is to give the novel's legions of loyal fans what they have been waiting over a century for...the return of the real Dracula." Evidently the legions of loyal fans are getting tired of ploughing through that damned epistolary format over and over again, and have been thirsting all this time, through all those sequels and remakes and re-imaginings and ripoffs, for a true, authentic Dracula, renewed and resurrected in the warm and wormy soil of corporate gimmickry.