LOS ANGELES, Sept. 16, 2009 — Roll over Edward Cullen, and tell Sookie Stackhouse the news. "Incarnadine: The True Memoirs of Count Dracula" comes to bookstores this month (and to Amazon, etc. online). And despite the boom in vampire sagas, author R. H. Greene thinks he has something unique to offer.
"It's for grown-ups, for one thing," Greene says of the first installment in his two-part Dracula "memoir." "I've never read a 'Twilight' novel, but I see Robert Pattinson everywhere I look, like everybody else. It does seem a bit like we're in the Hannah Montana era of gothic fiction, doesn't it? There's even an Edward Cullen Barbie Doll coming out. I think they're accessorizing him as a stewardess.
"Incarnadine is hoping to reach more traditional readers. People who will hopefully like having their assumptions challenged a little bit."
The conceit of Greene's novel is that it's a "newly discovered Victorian artifact" once owned by Mina Murray Harker, the heroine of Bram Stoker's 1897 classic "Dracula." The handwritten manuscript languished for a century in the cornerstone of a remote Bulgarian farmhouse before being excavated by looters. Their "minor literary payload" turned out to be a first-person chronicle by Dracula himself, covering over three centuries of both his human and "undead" existence.
In the memoir, Dracula tells the story of his life before he became a vampire, and of his own unholy transformation and that of his three "wives." The action begins in the late Middle Ages during the last great battles of the Turkish invasion of Eastern Europe, and ends with the first meeting between Dracula and Bram Stoker's protagonist Jonathan Harker. Dracula's adventures in Victorian England are the subject of "The Charnel House," aka "Memoirs Two," completed last July and currently being rewritten.
Greene believes the first-person voice lets the reader experience what it's like to be Dracula with unusual intimacy. "He's one of the most potent villains in literature, overwhelmed by his own compulsions. It was interesting to write him from the inside."
About a month after Greene's Dracula origin story goes to press, the Bram Stoker estate will release "Dracula The Un-Dead," an "official sequel" by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt that Greene says "sounds like a detective novel based on the Amazon extract."
Greene was unaware of the sequel while working on "Incarnadine", but "I wish them a lot of success. Between their sequel and my origin story, I think there's a unique opportunity for readers to re-evaluate their relationship to one of literature's most lasting works.
"And who knows? Maybe it's Dracula's turn to reign supreme again over the genre Bram Stoker all but invented for him. I'm pretty sure audiences are still going to care about him long after True Blood is just a pile of discount DVDs at Costco, and Edward Cullen has crumbled into dust."
WEBSITE: http://www.draculamemoirs.blogspot.com/
CONTACT AND REVIEW COPIES:
Margot Gerber
Email
Ph: 323-284-5149
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