121 years after Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’, his great-grandnephew has resurrected the vampire... and his creator

A previously unseen preface to the original 1897 novel and a journal hidden since that time: Dacre Stoker tells David Barnett how his new novel took an unexpected turn

The prequel reveals a new side to the father of the genre and his demons (Getty Images)

On Halloween night when Dacre Stoker was a boy growing up in Montreal, trick-or-treaters would knock on the door of the family home and ask, “Are you going to give us candy, or are you going to give us blood?”

At least, the ones of a more literary bent would, those who had made the connection between the family surname and that of the author of the all-time classic horror story, Dracula.

But it wasn’t until Dacre was about 12 and asked his father about it that he realised that not only did he share a name with Bram Stoker, he was actually related to the Irish writer – he was his great-grandnephew.