Controversial Dracula 'Memoir' Takes on Vlad the Impaler Vampire 'Myth'

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Sep 14, 2010, 07:40 ET

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- Did Dracula exist? Just in time for Halloween, a controversial Dracula "memoir" now out in paperback and in a specially priced Amazon Kindle edition is taking on what its author calls the Vlad the Impaler "myth."

Vlad was a maniacal 15th century Romanian despot who enjoyed spiking, boiling and skinning his victims alive, among other horrific tortures. He is today widely accepted as the direct historical inspiration for Bram Stoker's infamous creation, Count Dracula.

The problem, according to R. H. Greene, author of INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA, is that beyond the word "Dracula," which Stoker is known to have borrowed from a few lines in a history book, Bram Stoker knew virtually nothing about Vlad.

Greene says INCARNADINE is an attempt to reclaim Dracula as a figure of lore and the imagination. The book contains what Greene says is "an explicit new origin myth" for Dracula and his three "brides."

"The 'Vlad myth' is pervasive now," Greene says, "and it's come to distort Bram Stoker's achievement. Dracula is a literary creation, a creature of the imagination. Vlad was a historical sociopath.

"Stoker's own notes prove convincingly that he knew nothing about Vlad's sadistic rule. He didn't even know that the 'Dracula' whose patronym he borrowed was named 'Vlad.' He believed 'Dracula' was a generic term meaning 'devil.' The new editions of INCARNADINE are a way of speaking to that."

According to Greene, the Vlad myth was popularized by the insertion of a "Vlad" sequence into Francis Ford Coppola's film BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA, which purported to be a faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel.

"For people who haven't read the original, Coppola's very free adaptation has become the standard edition of the work. Because Bram Stoker's name is on the movie, people assume the details it contains are in the book. The Vlad scenes are a complete fabrication. There is nothing like them in Stoker."

INCARNADINE is written as if it's a recently discovered Victorian era manuscript authored by Dracula himself. As a memoir, the book presents Stoker's Dracula as "real." There is even a detailed discussion of INCARNADINE's authenticity in a bogus scholarly "foreword" that Greene calls his "revenge on the academic Lilliputians who tied Stoker's colossus down."

"I understand the fun in believing a monster like Dracula really existed," Greene says, "and INCARNADINE honors that impulse. At the same time, the book hopefully gives reasons for Dracula to become what he is that are both more frightening and more humanly compelling than this idea that he's simply based on a medieval Hitler figure.

"INCARNADINE acknowledges the Vlad myth in passing, but really what I hoped to do was to invite readers to dream again about a fairytale monster. Stoker's Dracula haunted the whole world for nearly a century before the modern impulse to explain everything away tethered him to the ground."

WEBSITE: http://draculamemoirs.blogspot.com