It is 1868, and a twenty-one-year-old Bram Stoker waits in a desolate tower to face an indescribable evil. Armed only with crucifixes, holy water, and a rifle, he prays to survive a single night, the longest of his life. Desperate to record what he has witnessed, Bram scribbles down the events that led him here ... A sickly child, Bram spent his early days bedridden in his parents' Dublin home, tended to by his caretaker, a young woman named Ellen Crone. When a string of strange deaths occur in a nearby town, Bram and his sister Matilda detect a pattern of bizarre behavior by Ellen--a mystery that deepens chillingly until Ellen vanishes suddenly from their lives. Years later, Matilda returns from studying in Paris to tell Bram the news that she has seen Ellen--and that the nightmare they've thought long ended is only beginning. A riveting novel of gothic suspense, Dracul reveals not only Dracula's true origin, but Bram Stoker's---and the tale of the enigmatic woman who connects them.
Dracul was a wonderfully Gothic read that includes many of the elements that we know from Dracula, the original story and the adaptations.
However, this re-assembling of the different elements of the Dracula story, unfortunately, did not work for me: the familiar elements somehow just felt old when in Dracula they felt novel. And the inclusion of Stoker himself and his family in the story of Dracul, just did not work for me, even if there are some interesting twists with respect to the motivation of the "undead".
I'd this is more a fault in this reader than it is of the book. I just have never done well with fiction that tries to hard to come across as "historical fiction", even less so with fiction that tries to come across as "faction".
I also struggled with the writing itself, which at times felt gimmicky, overwrought, and not particularly of its time. I.e. if this was supposed to be a prequel to Dracula, I would have expected a closer resemblance to the language used in Dracula. This is a minor quibble, tho. My main issue was that I was just bored for about 250 pages until the conclusion of the story.
