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Dracula more than a century ago, but a sequel to the novel by Stoker’s great grand-nephew will see them under attack from the undead once again.

Stoker’s blood relation resurrects Dracula | Books | guardian.co.uk.

I’m not sure who is going to be spinning faster Bram or Douglas but I’m sure that they’re both doing quite a fast rotation rate.

I can just about understand Sebastian Faulks doing another James Bond book as Bond through the movies has evolved and is more than the creation that started in the pages of Flemming’s novels. And the movies have been ‘official’ extensions.

But I don’t think anyone has dug up Bram Stoker to ask what he thinks of having an ‘official’ sequel. I know that Dracula is pretty much open source and he’s been adapted, used, abused in various forms but non have declared themselves as ‘official’ and as plotlines go this one doesn’t sound good:

The new book is set in London in 1912, a quarter of a century after the Count apparently “crumbled into dust”. Vampire-hunter Van Helsing’s protégé Dr Seward is now a disgraced morphine addict, and Quincey, the son of Stoker’s hero Jonathan, has become involved in a troubled theatre production of Dracula, directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself. The play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents’ terrible secrets, but before he can confront them his father is found murdered, impaled in Piccadilly Circus.

The original is written in classic epistolatory form, alternating between different narrators; the sequel adopts a more direct storytelling route. “[This] makes it more immediately accessible to a modern thriller readership, while remaining faithful to the spirit and atmosphere of the Victorian original,” said publisher Jane Johnson of HarperCollins UK.

I’m probably being too harsh and I might be surprised but I just wish that Dracula was left as it was. An amazing gothic novel that extended beyond itself without needing a sequel.