What could have inspired the personal assistant of a stage actor in the Victorian era to pen one of the most chilling horror novels ever written? His family is about to let us know.

Bram Stoker’s Gothic novel Dracula was published in 1897. Although critics were favourable in their reviews, the book did not turn out to be an immediate bestseller. However, over the years it has inspired numerous theatrical, television and film interpretations, been translated into 44 languages, and become the blueprint for ensuing vampire fiction.

Dracul, the authorised prequel, is co-authored by Stoker’s great-grandnephew Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker, an American novelist whose debut The Forsaken was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award in 2014. The annual award is presented by the Horror Writers Association for the year’s best writing in dark fantasy and horror.

Scheduled for release in 2018, Dracul is set in 1868 and follows a 21-year-old Bram as he encounters the creatures about which he would later write. According to Dacre — who also co-wrote a sequel to Dracula in 2009 titled Dracula the Un-dead — the new novel is based on the 102 pages missing from Stoker’s original draft of 529 pages, as well as Stoker family legends.

Dacre and Barker picked through the original typescript and Stoker’s notes and journals to analyse what the lost pages might have contained, searching “for lines that were crossed out that may have referenced anything Bram had to take out of the 102 pages,” says Dacre. “Since Dracul is a prequel … we wanted to have a really good idea what was included in Bram’s original and unedited version of Dracula.”

The new story will focus on Stoker’s life, detailing events culled from family lore, biographies, excerpts from his private notebook and the writers’ own speculation, and an encounter with an “ungodly evil, which he traps in an ancient tower.” It will also hypothesise what Stoker’s early life — he was a sickly child and often bedridden — “might have been like had the creatures he later created been real.”

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 17th, 2017