Dracul Not Dracula! Get This Straight.

                         Do you know how hard it is to get an image of the novel, Dracul?  No matter how many times I searched for Dracul images, only Dracula pictures showed up. I imagine the author, Dracre Stoker, great grand nephew of Bram Stoker, has to wrestle with this a lot, explaining that Dracul and Dracula are not one and the same.

And they're not. The author explains that his book is more in line with what Bram Stoker wanted printed, that the elder Stoker had more than 100 pages cut by his publisher. Of course, it would be hard to know what Bram Stoker did or didn't want, being that he's not around to tell us. (Or is he?) If we take the younger Stoker's word, then we would believe Bram was warning us that vampires exist. Do we want to believe this? I, for one, can handle horror better if I don't think vampires will drill into my neck or zombies eat my brains. Maybe the fear of believing it is true is what appeals to some readers. To each their own.

Poor Bram Stoker. In a recent novel I read, Stoker's Wilde, when little Bram was dying at age seven, it was the vampire and actor, Henry Irving who bit him and saved his life. Later, he gave him a job at the Lyceum Theatre, proving to be a friend for life. In Dracul, it's little Bram's nanny, who bites him and saves his life. Goodness, vampires were lining up to save the child. I guess they really wanted their story told, although it seems authors, including me, have gone hog wild with vampires.

Dracul is an adventurous read. A good time was had by all, except when they were dying, getting ripped apart, or having their blood sucked out. But hey, isn't that what a good vampire book is all about?