Rivals of Dracula - Hardcover

It has been almost one hundred years since a clutch of intrepid Englishmen drove a stake through Dracula's heart, and yet the cunning count, thanks in no small part to his creator, Bram Stoker, continues to exercise a tenacious hold on the imaginations of both readers and writers. We refuse to let him die. Not that his immortality consists of a fixed image. Consider these reappearances: in various stories Dracula has fought the Nazis, befriended Sherlock Holmes, been reviled as parasite feeding off civilization, even earned the distinction of being an unparalleled lover. RIVALS OF DRACULA, a collection of stories written over the last five decades that feature Dracula as a character, is the culmination of the vampire's exploits so far. For Stoker, the bloodthirsty Count Dracula represented the ultimate menace to civilization as defined by Victorian England: he was a foreigner, a defiler of the innocent, and a spreader of corruption that destroyed from within. The writers of the stories collected here are both traditional and inventive in their portrayals of the count, giving us Draculas who closely resemble Stoker's and Draculas who don't. Readers will encounter, for example, a Dracula who actually invites the sympathy of other social outcasts; a Dracula who has found a way to fit in with human society; and another whose sense of decorum and tradition is lost on his vulgar modern descendants. Some writers acknowledge Dracula's Eastern European roots but speak more directly to late-20th-century concerns: their Draculas are powerful metaphors for political tyranny and the ravages of human disease. And what do the stories in RIVALS OF DRACULA tell us about our persistent fascination with the monster? As editor Stefan Dziemaianowicz says, Dracula "is an irreplaceable expression of the dark side of our imagination".