Dracula-The Undead

Myself, I'm a big Vampire fan. Dracula, Hellsing, Angel, Buffy, Van Helsing, even the occasional bit of True Blood, I even play "Bite Me" on facebook. I love vampires. Real ones. Twilight "vampires" are freaking fairies, in both senses of the term. So naturally, when I discovered that Dacre Stoker, a descendant of Bram Stoker, was writing a sequel to the classic "Dracula," I was thrilled. Until I read it. Now I'm kinda mad.
To start with, the idea of a sequel to a book means, to my mind, it is a sequel to the ORGINAL book. Not the movie based on the book, not the myths that have sprung up around the book. "Dracula; The Undead" is not a sequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Rather, to my mind, it conjured up the idea of a decent fan fiction, not a worthy successor to a horror classic. "The Undead" starts off with the account of Jack Seward, from third person, not the diary/letter/newspaper format of the original which made it so endearing. Jack Seward is an opium addict, yet simultaneously a vampire hunter. He is hunting the vampiress Elizabeth Bathory. While the historian in me appreciates the shout-out to a real-life Transylvanian (the "real Dracula," Vlad Tepes, was Wallachian, a different part of Romania) who's exploits call vampirism to mind (she murdered upwards of 600 virgins, raping them and bathing in their blood) I found the way she was presented to be utterly predictable. Also, while yes she enjoyed the sexual pleasure of females (undeniable from history) she is better classified as a bisexual then a lesbian, as the book shows. As the book progresses, we meet the rest of the band that killed Dracula. Jonathan Harker is an alcoholic adulterer, his wife Mina part Vampire, their son Quincy an actor at odds with his parents. Van Helsing is a frail old man, at the point of heart failure, living from nitroglycerin pill to nitroglycerin pill, and Arthur Holmood, now known only as "Lord Godalming" is stuck in a loveless marriage, desiring nothing more to join his beloved Lucy in death. Not a single one of the band is a hero anymore. Their encounter with Dracula turned them all into pathetic whiners. I found this annoying, especially how Seward and Harker, both strong-willed men in the original work, are turned into pathetic nobodies.
The plot gets worse. SPOILER ALERT Dracula turns into a hero. He was not killed in the original, and every event in the original is re-interpreted to show him as a hero, hunting down the other Vampiress, Bathory. Dracula is a warrior for God, prideful, but not evil. This is intolerable to me. Yes, Vlad Tepes was a hero. Ok, he impaled a few thousand people, but compared to Richard Lionheart, the man was nothing as far as cruelty, and Tepes defended the church and his people against impossible odds for years. Dracula the character, however, is a soulless evil monster. He is not a good character. "Undead" took the character of Alucard from Hellsing and applied it to the original Dracula, and then made it bad.
The other plot point I cannot stand is Mina's loving Dracula. This comes from Francis Ford Coppola, NOT from Bram Stoker. Never did Mina call Dracula her "Dark Prince" in the original book. Never did they have sex. The scene where Dracula reveals that he and Mina had sex before she was married, and that Quincy Harker is actually Dracula's son, was so corny I laughed. The dialogue and plot of this novel are so corny and predictable I was outraged and amused simultaneously.
The other problem with this novel is that it's too blatant. Bram Stoker's novel was dark and sensuous, but much was left to the reader's imagination. None of this subtlety is in the "sequel." Sex and gore are blatantly described. Anne Rice, this ain't, but neither is it a novel worthy of carrying the name "Stoker" on it. Instead, it rates with halfway decent fanfiction, but not even in the same universe as the original Dracula. If you wana sequel to the movie "Bram Stoker's Dracula" by Francis Ford Coppola, this is right for you. You want a sequel to the book? You face dissappointment.