The Secret Life Of Laszlo Count Dracula

The diary of Dracula, beginning when he is a medical student in Paris. A fellow-Hungarian introduces him to debauchery and Dracula gets himself a mistress who is a patient at the mental hospital where he works. In a fit of jealousy he cuts her throat and returns to Hungary to pursue his depraved life style, killing and ravishing.

There have never been vampires, only tortured human beings. This is the provocative premise of this chilling novel in which Anscombe creates the memoirs of Laszlo, Count Dracula -- aristocrat, doctor, and helpless killer of young women. Set in the 19th century, Laszlo's story begins at medical school in Paris with a deadly attraction to a mental patient that leads him away from aristocratic society into the city's dark underworld. Laszlo returns to Transylvania to accede his dead brother's title. There he cultivates his image as a saintly doctor and trusted nationalist agent by day -- while the savage stalks the night with increasing cunning and ferocity. Evil, madness and sexuality!

While vampire stories have been part of popular culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been in recent decades that they have become a central part of American culture. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture looks at how vampire stories—from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Blacula, from Bela Lugosi's films to Love at First Bite—have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human. William Patrick Day looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity, as well as how many post-modern vampire stories reflect our fear and attraction to stories of addiction and violence. He argues that contemporary stories use the character of Dracula to explore modern values, and that stories of vampire slayers, such as the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, integrate current feminist ideas and the image of the Vietnam veteran into a new heroic version of the vampire story.

This is an encyclopedic work, arranged by broad categories and then by original authors, of literary pastiches in which fictional characters have reappeared in new works after the deaths of the authors that created them. It includes book series that have continued under a deceased writer's real or pen name, undisguised offshoots issued under the new writer's name, posthumous collaborations in which a deceased author's unfinished manuscript is completed by another writer, unauthorized pastiches, and "biographies" of literary characters. The authors and works are entered under the following categories: Action and Adventure, Classics (18th Century and Earlier), Classics (19th Century), Classics (20th Century), Crime and Mystery, Espionage, Fantasy and Horror, Humor, Juveniles (19th Century), Juveniles (20th Century), Poets, Pulps, Romances, Science Fiction and Westerns. Each original author entry includes a short biography, a list of original works, and information on the pastiches based on the author's characters.

This volume provides a critical reappraisal of Stoker’s Dracula by examining various adaptations of the book, as well as different literary, cinematic, theatrical, cultural, artistic and creative reworkings of the Gothic.