Portrait of the Metaphysician as a Young Man

By June Pulliam

03/10/2005

Kupfer, Allen C. The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2004. 204p.

When I first came across this book, I wanted to dislike it for two reasons: first, I've never liked any of Stoker's vampire hunters, finding them to be silly, unsympathetic individuals, and second, I feared that any piece of alternative literature focused on Van Helsing might turn into some mindless action adventure piece. In fact, at first, I thought that The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing might be movie tie in to this summer's action-adventure film Van Helsing. In general, I detest movie tie-ins as shameless attempts to bilk people of money without offering anything generally new to the original story. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Kupfer's book does neither of these things, but is a full-fledged prequel to Dracula.

The Journal of Professor Abraham Van Helsing examines the early years of Stoker's vampire hunter, when he first came to believe in the existence of the undead in 1885, approximately 12 years before the opening of Dracula. Kupfer's narrative style pays homage to Stoker's novel in many ways, the most obvious being the journal format. Dracula is composed not as a linear narrative with an omniscient narrative, but as different perspectives represented through a series of journal entries (composed with the most modern of technologies, including the cylinder phonograph and shorthand, and all transcribed by Mina on her typewriting machine), letters, and the occasional newspaper clippings.

Kupfer's novel follows this pattern. It is supposed to be Van Helsing's journal, but various other narrative perspectives are interjected. The journal is later given to Dr. Daniel Kupfer, his good friend, who writes his own comments into the manuscript. And then there's our "editor," the author, Dr. Kupfer's grandson, an English professor at a small community college who has never known his grandfather but through this journal he found in the walls of his grandmother's home.

Kupfer's novel also follows the spirit of Stoker's novel through the way it interweaves vampire folklore into the story. Vampires can be stopped by various means--among them, the scattering of poppy seeds. Vampires have a compulsive need to count according to some lore. Throwing a handful of poppy seeds to the vampire will slow its progress, compelling it to stop and count and becoming oblivious to the impending danger posed by the vampire hunter.

The novel also incorporates older vampire narratives, including J. Sheridan LeFanu's "Carmilla" and John Keats's "Lamia," works that describe female vampires. Malia is the main female vampire who plagues the hapless Abraham Van Helsing, who in his early days is rather pecker-led. All of Van Helsing's common sense flies out the window whenever Malia appears to him and attempts to seduce him. At one point, lives are actually lost because Van Helsing is unable to control his errant member in the presence of Malia. This weakness is similar what is demonstrated by Jonathan Harker in Dracula, when he is confronted by the Count's three vampire women. Malia herself makes reference to LeFanu and Keats. Her name is an anagram of the word "lamia," in much the way that Carmilla's name is an anagram of "Mircalla," the woman originally made into a vampire over 150 years previous to the beginning of LeFanu's novella.

Also impressive are the pains the publisher has taken to give the book the feel of a journal rather than a mass-produced document. I was reading from the hard bound version of the novel, which is printed on thick paper with uneven edges, giving the book the feel of a hand bound item which has not been mass produced.

For all of that, there are some inaccuracies in how Kupfer reads Stoker's novel and understands the sources for Dracula. Part of Van Helsing's desire to eradicate vampires stems from his having lost his wife to one of them. However, this addition to the story is not in keeping with the original text. In Stoker's Dracula, Van Helsing does indeed mention having a spouse, but she is not dead. Instead, he describes her as a "no-wife" who is dead to him, yet "alive by Church's law, though no wits, all gone" (176). While it is conceivable that Van Helsing could have remarried in the dozen years that elapse between his writing this journal and his appearance in Dracula, it seems unlikely that he would have two such wives who suffered a lengthy dementia before their eventual, or impending demise.

The two other inaccuracies are small, but worth noting, since readers of Kupfer's novel doubtless will be steeped in vampire lore themselves. Malia is linked to Lillith, the mother of all demons, who in contemporary vampire fiction is also represented as the mother of all vampires. Kupfer's characters trace Lillith's origins to the Bible, which is not accurate. Lillith does not appear in the Bible, but rather, in the Kabala.

The last inaccuracy is perhaps more forgivable, since a good many scholars have made this mistake also. Kupfer's Van Helsing links Count Dracula with the historic figure Vlad Tepes, 14^th century Romanian war lord. Many scholars, most notably Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu in In Search of Dracula, have propounded that Stoker read about Tepes in the British Library while doing research for his novel, and the character of the Count was greatly influenced by this idea. However, scholar Elizabeth Miller in Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, probably one of the most comprehensive books ever written about Stoker and Dracula, challenges the veracity of this idea, as there is simply no hard and fast evidence that Stoker did this research. Furthermore, except for Count Dracula's Transylvanian residence, there is no other similarity between him and Tepes.

However, in spite of these inaccuracies, fans of vampire literature and of Dracula will enjoy Kupfer's addition to Stoker's narrative.

McNally, Raymond T. and Radu Florescu. In Search of Dracula. New York: Houghton Miffin, 1994. 

Miller, Elizabeth. Dracula: Sense and Nonsense. Desert Island Books, 2000.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: Oxford, 1983. ¸ 1897.