I’ve been a hardcore book lover since childhood. At some point, whether in childhood or my early teens, certain preferences began to rule over my choices in reading material. I found myself reading mostly horror, with a concentration on vampires, and for years that’s all I paid attention to. If I went to the local used bookstore and found a paperback on with a bloodsucker on the cover, that baby was going home with me. I wound up reading a handful of excellent books, some godawful ones and a ton of novels in between whose titles I can no longer even remember.

I eventually weaned myself from the vampire habit somewhat, broadening my field of interest. A few years ago, I found myself enamored with the epistolary format of novels, an interesting narrative style where plots unfold in a series of written records rather than one flowing text. The device is fairly adaptable, and has been used by numerous authors several different ways. Some are in the form of letters back and forth between two or more characters, such as Wolfgang Bauer’s The Feverhead or Douglas Coupland’s The Gum Thief. Others, like Hillary Raphael’s I Love Lord Buddha, are all over the place, throwing interrelated documents from multiple characters together into an experimental mishmash that looks nothing like anything that came before it.

It wasn’t until recently that I realized one of my favorite novels growing up was actually written in this format. Stoker’s Dracula was laid out as a series of journal entries (some paper, some not), following multiple characters as they played their roles in a tense struggle between good and evil. It seems my appreciation of this style goes back further than I originally thought.

There have been numerous pseudo-sequels, adaptations and expansions of this classic novel penned over the years. Marie Kiraly attempted to continue the survivors’ lives through Mina Harker’s perspective in Mina. John Marks brought the story, part and parcel, into post-9/11 Manhattan in Fangland. Even Dacre Stoker, a great-grand-nephew of the original novelist, threw his hat into the ring with Dracula: the Undead, a sequel picking up twenty-five years after Dracula’s finale.

Rhiannon Frater’s Tale of the Vampire Bride, however, goes back to the source and starts over. There are no heroic doctors, no brash Texans and no crazy, spider-eating madmen locked up in asylums here. Instead, the novel follows one young woman as she is forced into the role of Dracula’s fourth Bride.

Lady Glynis Wright’s parents want nothing more than for their daughter to marry well and live the life of a proper woman in British society. Along with Glynis’s younger sister May, Earl Edric and Lady Antoinetta Wright drag her all over the European continent in search of a suitable groom, only to have Glynis petulantly stomp her foot (an endearing characteristic she retains throughout the entirety of the novel) and demand that she not be handed off to someone she does not love. Time and again, suitors are rejected and the family must move on to another locale to find their headstrong daughter an acceptable husband. Glynis does not much care for the sheltered existence of a high-born woman, instead longing for a life of adventure, or at the very least another meeting with the scandalous Lord Byron, whom she met once and has developed an infatuation with.

None of the wishes of the Wright family, not her parents desire for her to marry well nor Glynis’s own longing to be free, matter the moment Vlad Dracula decides that she will be his newest Bride and his ticket to British society. As soon as he sets eyes on her, she is doomed, and now she must fight her way back to the ones she loves while clinging to her dwindling mortality, fighting off both her husband and the unimaginable thirst that grips her.

Tale of the Vampire Bride follows the same journal entry style as Stoker’s novel, each chapter beginning with a date and location to remind the reader that they are spying directly upon a character’s innermost thoughts before gently transitioning into a more formal narrative style. It works very well, keeping the audience close without causing distraction. In addition to keeping with the original story’s format, it is obvious that a great deal of both fictional and real-world research went into recreating early nineteenth-century Europe. The characters are people of their times, not only in dress but demeanor. The wealthy aristocrats behave in a manner befitting their stations in life (and even Glynis clings to some of these conventions, or at least feels guilt upon breaking them, as a vampire), and Dracula is every inch the fourteenth-century warrior despite his pretentions of civility. In fact, towards the end of the novel, I had become so outraged at his casual brutality that I wanted to reach into the pages and choke him.

Much of the time, vampire novels take a single-angled approach, offering readers grotesque bloodshed without humanity or nearly pornographic romances without monstrosity. Not with this novel. Violence, sensuality, tense conflict and intense drama roll at full speed against the backdrop of romantic Old Europe from the first page to the very end. Frater’s novel has managed to be almost everything to every vampire fan, a feat not easily pulled off. At nearly five hundred pages, Tale of the Vampire Bride has more than just a little something for everyone.

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