Fred Saberhagen’s Dracula: The Vampire as Neo-Victorian Hero

Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula has been adapted numerous times, often in forms that would be defined as Neo-Victorian, including a series of nine novels by Fred Saberhagen published between 1975 and 1996. In the first volume, The Dracula Tape, Saberhagen works with the fact that Stoker’s master vampire is always silent, his story told by characters who have sworn to destroy him. By having Dracula tell his own story in his own words, Saberhagen creates a surprisingly humane and sympathetic character with ethical standards that are equivalent or superior to those of his opponents. Two volumes The Holmes-Dracula File (1978) and Séance for a Vampire (1994) also combine Dracula with Sherlock Holmes, alternating chapters by Dracula and those by Dr. Watson. Highlighting Dracula’s humanity is the fact that Saberhagen introduces a surprising plot twist: Holmes is Dracula’s nephew, the son of Dracula’s brother Radu. Saberhagen’s redemption of Dracula makes his series worthy of inclusion in this handbook because it reveals that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries often respond to their Victorian ancestors by criticizing that past. The Holmes-Dracula File is set in 1897, the year of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee and looks pointedly at both Victorian science and colonialism, while Séance for a Vampire (1994) features spiritualism and takes Dracula, Holmes, and Watson to St. Petersburg, where they encounter Rasputin on the eve of the Russian Revolution.