There is an official sequel to Dracula knocking around bookshops right now. I implore you to read it, it’s something else. To say it is shoddy is an insult to shoes. Within the first few pages, there is a glaring factual error concerning the original book – Carfax Abbey, Dacre Stoker, is not in Whitby. It is in Essex. You dunderheaded clot.

It gets better from there, of course. Abandoning Stoker’s epistolary format and instead giving us a poorly-written third-person narration, mired in perpetual cliche, it picks up about 25 years after the plot of the original. Quincey Harker is the dull, dull, protagonist, far as I can tell so far*. Jack Seward is there as a morphine-addicted vampire hunter, “God’s madman” as he hilariously self-defines at one point, just after he’s done some swashbuckling rope-swinging and vampire-fighting. This is a man in his fifties, mind, strung out on the old horse. Jack cuts something of a Zelig-like figure, having worked with Darwin, flown in the same plane which first crossed the English channel and been there at the Wright Brothers’ first demonstration of flight in Europe. One wonders what other late Victorian/Edwardian notables he has knocked around with. Jonathan Harker is a whoring old drunkard. It looks like Van Helsing is a suspect in the Ripper murders. Oh, and the big villain so far is soft-focus lesbian vampire Elizabeth Bathory.

Seriously, this is brilliant.

*I’m barely a quarter of the way through, I’m expecting it to turn into Tolstoy any minute.