Forget TWILIGHT, NEW MOON, VAMPIRE DIARIES, TRUE BLOOD and all the current sagas that depict vampires like twenty-something supermodels. Author R. H. Greene wants to put the monster back into vampire fiction, and that's why he wrote INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA, a just-released "origin myth" for Dracula and his three "wives" written as if by Dracula himself that hopes to do for vampires what Gregory Maguire's WICKED did for the Witches of Oz.
"Like a lot of teen culture, I think TWILIGHT is basically an overwrought metaphor for the emotional perils of dating," Greene says. "You know, Edward Cullen as the bad boy the world won't let you be with because he's too dangerous and you're too pure. That just doesn't speak to me, and I don't think I'm alone."
According to Greene, INCARNADINE tries to do something TWILIGHT can't. "Something closer to what WICKED does, which is to give an entirely fresh perspective on a character we all think we know.
"And it's for grown-ups," Greene adds. "It has to be. Violence, heresy, erotic compulsion - they're at the heart of Dracula's story, because, for me, they're at the heart of what Bram Stoker originally wrote."
To "get into character" as Dracula, Greene relocated to Bulgaria and lived in a ramshackle farmhouse in a remote village near the Romanian border. In Bulgaria, Greene did virtually all the writing on INCARNADINE and its Victorian-era follow-up THE CHARNEL HOUSE, completed last July and currently being rewritten.
"It was like finding a time machine," Greene says. "It brought me as close as I could get to living in the Middle Ages, the era Dracula comes from. Because despite a few conveniences and a lot of bottled beer, the life of a Bulgarian village is much the same as it was 500 years ago. There are superstitions. People live and die where they're born, and grow most of what they eat. There was even a Medieval-era stone cross at the mouth of the village, supposedly put there to ward off the plague."
Virtually no one spoke English, which Greene found "useful. Most days, the only meaningful conversation I could have was with myself. I think that's what a memoir is - a conversation with the self.
"And I was like a unicorn to them - the only American they'd ever seen. Dracula is a sort of unicorn too. He's a mythical beast, an object of fascination and wonder. It helped me to feel what he might be feeling, while living in a place where he might have lived. I couldn't figure out a way to become a vampire, and I was short a few wives. So this was the next best thing."
INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA is available at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and in better bookstores everywhere.
SOURCE Protagonist Productions
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