Vlad held his brother, and tipped his head back,
gaze going to the weathered wooden cross that hung above the altar.
God help
me,
he prayed. Help me kill them all.
From Dragon Slayer
Copyright © 2018 by Lauren Gilley
You'd be hard pressed to find someone who hasn't at least heard of Dracula. Whether they've read the book, watched one of the many film depictions, or have caught brief snatches of legends amidst Halloween-time documentaries, it's a familiar name in pop culture, and the literary canon. But, and perhaps Bram Stoker's novel is to blame, so often the Dracula we see in media is a heavily fictionalized depiction; a blood-sucking character straight from nightmare that shares very little with the real man himself.
He was always going to be a part of my paranormal series - because how could he not be? I had a vague sense of who he was, and what he was famous - or infamous - for, and a headful of stark imagery: namely the "Forest of the Impaled." But it wasn't until I began researching and story-mapping in earnest that a heretofore unheard of, for me anyway, image of Vlad Dracula began to coalesce. Monster? Warlord? Fiend?
Or the product of a violent age and a tumultuous childhood?
These aren't questions I have set out to answer. Rather, it's been my aim to take bald fact, and piece together an emotional framework for a character all too often reduced to a bloodthirsty beast in Western textbooks and fiction. I think he's fascinating, and I leave it up to my readers to decide whether they love or loathe him.