A Brief Guide to Early Literary Dracula AUs
One of the coolest things about being a Dracula fan in the 2010s is all the recent publication of materials shedding light on all of the really bonkers alternate Draculas that either nearly became Dracula itself or spun off from the original 1897 text. So yeah… here’s a rundown of the three weird psuedo-canonical AUs that this fin de siecle vampire novel just sort of… comes with.
Stoker’s Notes/Typescript/“Dracula’s Guest”
Bram’s notes for Dracula indicate that he worked on the novel for at least seven years, that it went through many substantial changes in its plot and cast, and that he had a lot of completely metal ideas that either fate, his editors, or his slender grip on good taste did not permit to appear in the final novel. Some of these things appear in fragmentary form in the typescript for Dracula. Some of them got recycled into a short story later published as “Dracula’s Guest.” Some of them only appear scrawled in Stoker’s atrocious handwriting on the various papers collected at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia.
Things initially were going to take place in Styria and the villain’s name was going to be Count Wampyr.
Arthur doesn’t exist and Jack/Lucy is canon.
Jonathan Harker has a “shrewd, skeptical sister.”
There’s a third heroine named Kate Reed (or Kate Lee) who is school chums with Lucy and Mina and apparently helps to spread the flow of gossip about Lucy and her curly-hair beau going to St. James concerts.
There’s a painter named Francis who probably discovers that the Count (in addition to having no reflection and showing up as a skeleton in photographs) cannot even be painted.
Other unused characters include a philosophic historian, a paranormal investigator, and a pair of deaf/mute servants in the Count’s employ.
The Count has a secret chamber where everything is blood red, and it’s apparently really scary.
Quincey might be a professional inventor named Brutus Marix. He also might go to Transylvania in the middle of the book. Also, he just might SAVE THE DAY DURING THE FINAL BATTLE BY OPENING FIRE WITH AN EARLY FORERUNNER TO THE MACHINE GUN.
There appear to have been werewolves planned.
Jack has a spooky party at his house where everyone has to tell a ghost story like they’re living it up at the Villa Diodati. Dracula shows up and is the thirteenth guest at this super goth affair and presumably tells the spookiest story of all.
Jonathan spends three chapters/100 pages doing all sorts of crazy stuff that happens before what we now think of a Chapter 1 of Dracula. These shenanigans include encountering the Count pretending to be dead in a Munich leichenhaus, going to see a performance of The Flying Dutchman, and doing all that incredibly spooky stuff in “Dracula’s Guest” where he has adventures with wolf friends on Walpurgisnacht.
Castle Dracula sinks into the earth in a VOLCANIC EXPLOSION after Dracula dies.
There is also mention of Dracula FLYING out of his coffin into the air during the final confrontation and the Brides getting taken out by chance BOLTS OF LIGHTNING.
Seriously. We have legitimate evidence that were we but in the true and righteous timeline, Dracula would have ended with lightning bolts and machine guns going off in an aerial vampire battle before a volcano explodes.
Makt Myrkranna (AKA Powers of Darkness AKA Icelandic Bootleg Porno Dracula)
So a few years after Dracula was published, it appears that somebody in Sweden ripped it off, made it much much more Hammer Horror, and published it as their own thing called Mörkrets Makter (Powers of Darkness). Then, after that, Valdimar Ásmundsson in Iceland ripped that off and republished it as his own thing called Makt Myrkranna (…also Powers of Darkness). This latter work just got translated into English in 2017, and there’s been intense speculation as to whether or not whomever originally wrote this thing had anything to do with Bram Stoker and his early drafts for the novel, given that it is headed by a preface that is controversially claimed to have been written by Bram, himself.
The first four chapters of the book (the ones everyone tends to really like) are now massively massively expanded, and Jonathan Harker (now named Thomas) gets to spend much more time exploring the castle, trying to escape, having the Count tell him creepy sexual anecdotes, and watching busty women get murdered.
The three women in the castle have been condensed into one woman, who seems to be the Count’s vampiric, incesty bride/cousin/whatever and whose death involved her being locked in a bedroom with her lover until he went mad and threw himself out a window.
Instead of finding a secret room of boxes with dirt in them, Jonathan Thomas finds a secret ritual orgymurder room where primordial ape men engage in forbidden revels while the Count bites hypnotized virgins to death.
Everything that is not in the massively expanded castle section is barely sketched out summaries of lots and lots of wacky things happening with no real explanation (apparently these portions were treated with more detail in at least one version of Mörkrets Makter, but that’s not available in English yet).
Lucy (now Lucia) becomes a vampire, but she is never staked, and her plot is never really resolved. Arthur, convinced she is alive after people watch her get back up from being dead, orders that people leave out some blankets and snacks for her (very considerate), and then that thread just sort of ends.
Renfield doesn’t exist. Jack sort of makes up for this gap in the novel’s tragically dead madmen quota by going mad and dying himself.
Said going mad and dying is facilitated by him attending one two many freaky mesmerism parties at Carfax with the Count’s posse of debauched, anarchist, international conspirator, orgymurder cultist noblemen.
Then like… a mysterious violinist shows up at his asylum and the next thing you know, the Count & Co. have taken over the joint, Quincey has to pretend to go crazy to infiltrate, and the entire place burns down.
There is actually some sort of police investigation into all of the many many many illegal things going on. After Van Helsing knifes Dracula to death, Quincey takes the fall for him, but the investigators don’t end up taking him to trial.
Kazıklı Voyvoda (AKA Impaling Voivode AKA Dracula in Istanbul AKA Turkish Nationalist Propaganda Bootleg Dracula)
Taking a cue from Ásmundsson and whomever the Mörkrets Makter guy is (or not…), Turkish author Ali Rıza Seyfi wrote his own pirated version of Dracula and published it as his own work in 1928. Unlike the Makt Mykrannaverse, the world of Kazıklı Voyvoda is fairly faithful to the original text… save that the action is transposed from London to Istanbul, the events of the story now postdates the Turkish War of Independence, and the entire cast (Dracula excepted) is now very Turkish and very fond of waxing eloquent about their immense national pride in being very Turkish.
Dracula is explicitly identified as being Vlad III, and he is a marauding terrible foreign menace from the exotic West, persecuting the good Eastern folk of Istanbul just as he historically persecuted and impaled their ancestors before them. Anyone who has ever read and enjoyed any academic essay on Dracula and the colonial gaze may begin to salivate uncontrollably.
Forty-seven years before Salem’s Lot, Seyfi establishes that pretty much any religious symbol works on a vampire if you believe in it, and everyone throughout the text waves around charms made out of suras of the Koran and such to great effect.
Azmi (Jonathan) gets the tiniest scraps of expanded backstory in which we learn about his childhood predisposition towards fainting and the existence of his pious mother who took him to saints’ shrines in the hopes he might faint less.
Güzin (Mina) is no longer one of Dracula’s victims (unlike in the 1953 film adaptation of this book). She is, however, still an incredibly hardcore researcher nerd who makes sure to tell her fiance all sorts of cool Vlad III history facts.
Turan (Arthur), Afif (Jack), and Özdemir (Quincey) all served together during the war and became bros that way instead of just being three guys who went on crazy globetrotting adventures together before all independently deciding to propose to the same girl.
Resuhȋ (Van Helsing) makes sure to drop a line reminding everyone of that time they all did blood tests and found out their blood types are compatible… you know… just in case anybody in this post-blood-typing era might be doing a bunch of blood transfusions and worrying about fatal hemolytic reactions.
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