Okay, okay, I could be reading all kinds of stuff in preparation for the Writers Festival. All kinds of stuff that I don't actually have time to read because I'm busy preparing for the Writers Festival. I could be reading Linden MacIntyre's The Bishop's Man (which is sadly, oddly, topical right now.) I could be reading Where Am I? by Colin Ellard and getting my inner neuroscience nerd psyched. I would be reading David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries if the office had a copy yet.
But I could not resist. Dracula: the Un-Dead, by Dacre Stoker. Bram Stoker's great-grandnephew. (And Ian Holt, who doesn't seem to get much of the press attention.) It came in two days ago, blood-red cover and all.
I started out sort of amused at the 25-years-later state of the main characters (Dr. Seward's a crazy morphine addict running around hunting vampires, Harker's a drunk, Mina just hasn't aged much a la the One Ring and is still carrying a torch for Dracula, and their son is dreaming of a career in the theatre while being forced through law school, and has never been told anything about the whole vampire incident his parents went through back before he was born.) All that's kind of entertaining, in the same sort of way that Anno Dracula was. I could even deal with the bits with our (apparently) new vampire foe, Elizabeth Bathory, although something bothers me about a Dracula sequel where you get to see the inner thoughts and memories of the vampire. Ah well.
But now, a few chapters in, I've just been completely blindsided by the sudden appearance in the narrative of Bram himself, and a theatrical production of the novel Dracula. What the...?
Quincey Harker (you may or may not recall, depending on your nerdiness, that the Harkers named their first son after Quincey Morris, who dies in the final battle of Dracula) runs into Bram Stoker in a theatre in Paris, points out that his parents are Jonathan and Mina Harker, then goes off and gets a copy of the novel and is only slightly disturbed by the fact that it's all about his parents - he's more interested in playing the part of his father in the production. And then we go back to vampires stalking the streets.
Lesbian vampires, of course. I guess I was expecting that.
I'm just confused enough by the weird metafictional quality of the Bram character that I think I've got to read on - something really interesting might be going on here... or it might be a driverless-ghost-carriage-wreck waiting to happen. We'll see.
