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By BOB D'ANGELO

The Tampa Tribune

Published: October 18, 2009

"Dracula: The Un-Dead," by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt (Dutton, $27)

Drac is back. And it's time to cut literature's No. 1 vampire some slack.

Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic classic "Dracula" stoked man's fears of the undead, creatures that preserved their immortality by feasting on the blood of unwitting victims.

Now, Stoker's great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker has teamed with screenwriter and Dracula documentarian Ian Holt to produce an equally eerie - and compelling - sequel.

"Dracula: The Un-Dead" is predictable at times, but the writing is fresh and descriptive. The authors explore the dank, foggy crevices of London's inner city in the early 20th century and seamlessly entwine it with an equally lurid in Paris.

An awful family secret has been kept from young Quincey Harker, who is trying to carve out a life of his own in the theater, away from the clutches of his father, Jonathan Harker.

But the elder Harker, who, with his wife, Mina, was part of the group that destroyed Dracula in the late 1880s, had reason to be such a control freak in matters concerning his son.

Dacre Stoker's Dracula is darker and more elegant and vulnerable than the count depicted in films by Bela Lugosi, Yet his motives do not seem clear to those who would fear him the most.

Enter Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who is even more sinister than Dracula. She has the same goals as Dracula's enemies and is vicious in her pursuit. That makes her final confrontation with the count even more spellbinding.

Stoker and Holt introduce historical perspective into their plot and float a theory involving another notorious legend - Jack the Ripper. A bubbling subplot has Inspector Colin Cotford, who worked the Ripper cases in 1888, trying to reopen and solve the case in 1912.

Quincey Harker admires a brooding Romanian actor named Basarab, who plays Dracula so convincingly on stage that he could be ... well, there is that predictability.

The authors use descriptive - and graphic - passages, particularly when describing the mayhem inflicted by Countess Bathory.

The final chapters race forward with chilling intensity, with Quincey confronting his demons. But which demon? Bathory? Or Dracula?

"Ask yourself why you cannot kill me," Dracula tells Harker. "You are what I am. You cannot kill me without killing yourself."

Is blood thicker than water? Or will young Harker's blood run cold? The answer becomes apparent in a richly told novel that begs for a sequel.

Bob D'Angelo is a Tribune sports copy editor. He can be reached at rdangelo@tampatrib.com.

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