Books: Dracula My Love
Mina Harker reboot of Stoker’s Dracula novel shows why girls go ga-ga for Dracula
Rating: 3 Stars
HOLLYWOOD: “Stoker’s Dracula is a very evil, ghoulish old man, endlessly discussed and feared, and rarely seen after the first few chapters,” says Dracula My Love author Syrie James. “I didn’t see how Mina could possibly fall in love with a character like that.”
Dracula My Love is told from the point of view of Mina Harker and her obsession with Nicolae Dracula. The male characters are held to the plot of the original while we learn more about Mina and what was not told in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Mina, newly married to Jonathan Harker, loves her husband but there’s something drawing her to Dracula.
“One day it occurred to me, what if Mina’s journal entries weren’t the entire truth?” says James. “What if Dracula only appeared as an old man to the men in the story, but to the women he wished to woo, he appeared in his youngest and most attractive form…just as the female vampires at his castle appeared to Jonathan as ravishing beauties? Mina could fall madly in love with that man and become involved in a passionate love affair so scandalous, she couldn’t bring herself to write the true story in her journal…until now. I got excited about that concept. That’s the book I decided to write.”
James began working on Dracula My Love soon after completing her previous novel, The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë. “I’d had so much fun writing Dracula, My Love,” says James. “I was definitely not finished writing about vampires.” After turning in the manuscript for Dracula, My Love, James was invited to write a story for the novella Nocturne.
“Nocturne is about a woman who’s saved from death and then falls in love with a devastatingly handsome, fascinating, but enigmatic stranger with whom she’s snowbound for days during a raging blizzard,” says James. “When she finds out his dark secret, that he’s an ages-old vampire torn between his desire for her and his thirst for her blood, she’s miles from anywhere and has nowhere to run.”
Nocturne is being published by Vanguard Press in January, in time for Valentine’s Day.
Dracula My Love explores Dracula’s obsession with Mina and Mina’s growing love for Dracula. This book tries to fill in the gaps in the original novel by Bram Stoker. It appeals to readers who already love vampire stories, to those who enjoy a passionate, adventure-filled love story, and to those who love historical fiction. It may even entice readers of contemporary vampire fiction back to the Victoria era, to meet one of the first and most powerful vampire of them all.
Syrie James was born in Poughkeepsie, New York. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
Dracula My Love by Syrie James. Trade Paperback, 480 pages, Publisher: Avon A (July 20, 2010), Language: English. ISBN: 9780061923036 $14.99
