Bram Stoker’s relative writes new Dracula

A new Dracula book is on its way, written by the great grand-nephew of the horror story’s creator, Bram Stoker. Using Bram’s handwritten notes, Dacre Stoker is penning a sequel, which he has called Dracula: The Un-Dead, the original title for Dracula before an editor changed it. The novel, which will be published a year from now, draws on excised characters, existing character back-stories and plot threads that were cut from the original novel, which has never been out of print since it was first published in 1897.

The new book is the first Dracula story to be fully authorised by the Stoker family since the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi (pictured), and looks set to be a bestseller. It has already been sold for £1m to Dutton US, HarperCollins UK and Penguin Canada, and a film version is also being planned, with shooting expected to begin next June.

Dacre Stoker, who formerly coached the Canadian Olympic Pentathlon team and now lives in the US, is writing the novel with Dracula historian Ian Holt, a screenwriter and member of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. The new story is set in London in 1912, a quarter of a century after the blood-sucking Count apparently came to grief. The Vampire-hunter Van Helsing's protege Dr Seward is now a disgraced morphine addict, and Quincey, the son of Stoker's hero Jonathan, has become involved in a troubled theatre production of Dracula, directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself. The play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents' terrible secrets, but before he can confront them his father is found murdered, impaled in Piccadilly Circus.

Says Stoker, who only read his great grand-uncle's novel when he went to college: "Growing up, all the Stokers in my generation were pretty blase about the fact we were related to this great horror writer. At Hallowe’en we'd get all these comments about 'Are we going to get bitten if we go round to the Stokers?'"