The Dracula Tape

"The reason people still read Dracula for fun is that it’s a really great book. There have been so many re-imaginings of it – there’s Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula ; Tim Lucas’ The Book of Renfield ; even Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker has written a retelling. But my favourite is Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape , which is a bit forgotten now. It’s a retelling of Dracula from Dracula’s point of view. One of the beautiful things about Bram Stoker’s book is everyone gets a point of view – we have Jonathan Harker’s point of view, and Mina Harker’s, and Dr Seward’s – everyone’s except Dracula’s. This book gives us Dracula’s point of view, and it is fabulous. Dracula’s line is, “Look, guys, I’m just this nice European count. I just wanted to come to England. I met this woman, we fell in love, and everyone acted like a xenophobic monster. I’m the victim here. I didn’t kill Mina Harker; these idiots who didn’t understand blood types killed her by giving her a blood transfusion she didn’t need with the wrong type of blood. These guys are religious fanatics. They hate women, they’re sexist pigs, they fear foreigners, and I’m just a guy trying to make my way in the world…” It’s so wounded , and you can just hear him rolling his eyes between the lines as he writes, as he gives his version of the story. Vampires are often depicted as malevolent – they can be romantic, they can be attractive, they can be sexy – but I love the idea of a vampire who’s just totally and completely fed up with humans and thinks we’re all a bunch of idiots. If he’s immortal, then of course from his point of view, we’re all morons. Oh, absolutely you’re persuaded. And it’s funny, you actually see some of this getting picked up in later versions of Dracula. If you watch Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula , Van Helsing comes across as a fanatic – and that’s right out of The Dracula Tape , that wild-eyed faith in science. Let’s face it, if you were certain about science in 1897 you were certain about a lot of things that would be debunked in the next hundred years – like measuring skulls to demonstrate intelligence, and maternal impression. You see that interpretation again in the recent Nosferatu , where Willem Dafoe plays this wild-eyed, insane occultist version of a Van-Helsing-inspired character. So I think The Dracula Tape has permeated our culture. It’s not a very well-known book, but it’s slipped into the walls of the house of our culture, like a termite. This is a book I wrote that came out in 2020 – right as the pandemic began, weirdly enough. I grew up with my mom’s book club. I think they’re celebrating their 49th year in existence, so they’ve been around forever. I really hated them when I was growing up. They were these women who came to the house, they were loud, I had to stay in my room… As I got older and started to know them as human beings, I realized that they’ve been through lives that oftentimes we never knew about as their kids. We didn’t know the things they had dealt with. For years, I had this idea for a book about a vampire moving to a small southern town where the only people who notice anything’s awry is this book club of middle-aged women. Everyone dismisses them, because everyone always dismisses middle-aged women, and they have to take on the task of facing him down. I thought, a vampire is ultimately responsible only to his appetite, and your mom is nothing but outside responsibilities: to her family, to her children, to her friends, everything. So it was pitting these two opposites against each other. I decided I would go with a more biologically oriented vampire. I didn’t want to get into the supernatural angle. The big thing I faced was, why is he drinking blood? The human blood supply is about nine thousand calories max, and you need a couple of thousand calories a day to live. That means a vampire is dropping two or three bodies a month, and if he’s going to live somewhere that makes no sense. Evolutionarily speaking, that would have been bred out of vampires a long time ago. But I thought he could be using the human body as a sort of dialysis machine, to filter his blood and cleanse it of impurities and toxins. That made a lot more sense. Animals that feed on blood often have a numbing agent in their saliva, and sometimes a mild narcotic agent. So I thought my vampire could be like an intoxicant that his victims get addicted to. And it went from there. The thing I was so astonished by is how much the image of the vampire overlaps with the image of the serial killer – this person who drifts into town and lives among us unsuspected, and preys on humans and toys with them and victimizes them."