This just in...And...just in...time for Halloween.
Dracula is no longer just a creature of the night.
He's a bovine of the barnyard, too.
More on that shortly.
(CNN) -- Move over, Edward Cullen.
Tell those bayou bloodsuckers from "True Blood" to step aside, too.
More than 112 years after he first climbed out of the coffin, the world's most famous vampire is back -- and he's bloodier than ever.
"Dracula the Un-Dead," released this month in the United States, is a sequel to Bram Stoker's 1897 classic written by Dacre Stoker, the original author's great-grandnephew.
The book, co-written by Dracula historian Ian Holt, picks up 25 years after the Victorian-era monster is supposedly killed in the original and is based in part on 125 pages of handwritten notes that Bram Stoker left behind.
But while many of the original characters are here -- troubled couple Jonathan and Mina Harker and vampire hunter Van Helsing among them -- the horror has gotten a 21st-century update. The sex and violence that Stoker deftly alluded to in the original are, at times, front and center in his descendant's sequel.
"You've got to keep in mind the perspective," said Dacre Stoker, a native of Montreal, Quebec, now living in Aiken, South Carolina. "The degree of sex and violence he had, in this very stuffy and conservative Victorian society, was cutting edge at the time. Even the exposure of a woman's flesh, the piercing of the flesh, was a metaphor for the sex act."
And with authors from Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris to Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite having crafted their own, sometimes lurid, reworkings of the vampire legend, Stoker said he knew that the new book couldn't just be a straight continuation of the first.
"We've got to keep up with what other people are doing," he said. "Otherwise, our story would be toast."
Of all the books, movies and other tales to use Dracula's name throughout the decades, the novel is the first since the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie to have the Stoker family's endorsement and input.
Response to and reviews of the book have been largely positive.
"This daring sequel captures the essence and gothic glory of the original," USA Today's Carroll Memmott wrote.
I'm not the type who sticks his neck out, so to speak, by huffingly and puffingly asserting that sequels, such as they are, are always inferior and a form of literary sacrilege.
Most of my philosophy on the issue comes out of the "lighten the f**k up" folder.
Personally, I'm more a fan of the "spin" style of furthering a character's adventures, that being defined more of a "what if" as opposed to a "what's next" narrative...for example, rather than "Dracula-Picking It Up Where We Left Off", how about"what if" the Drac Attack survived until modern times and cleverly altered his physical appearance to sufficently fool the American public into thinking that he was an articulate young black man who then got himself elected the first African-American Pres....well, you get the idea....
The MSNBC critics would shred it.
The Fox News Channel critics would nominate if for Pulitzer.
Now, while this project bears, at least, the mild aroma of legitimacy because it's written by a relative, it still has the eyebrow that always arches at questionable intent arching.
I mean, come on, would new written adventures of James Bond necesarily be as wry, satirical and entertaining just because they were written by third cousin Floyd Fleming?
Or would it bomb, James Bomb?
All of that said, I appreciate that great grand Dacre makes it bloody plain that any whining from purists is a cross he doesn't plan on bearing.
Dacre, who is touring the United States in support of the release, said he was prepared for the inevitable backlash from pure-blood purists who don't think the original should be sullied with a follow-up.
"I have heard just a bit of it," he said. "People say it's better to leave some of these mysteries alone; let's not solve them all. Believe me, when you read our story, you'll know we don't solve them all."
And he has some other advice for those diehards: Lighten up.
"This is entertainment. Go with it," he said. "If you don't want to read it, you don't have to."
Good for you, young Stoker.
And I think you deserve props for being up front by, if in an admittedly veiled way, fessing up what this whole thing is about.
Evolving the iconic Dracula from a creature of the night...
...into a bovine of the barnyard.
Cash cow, baby.
And, hey nephew, if people don't dig what you've unburied...
Tell em' they can bite you.
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