Grady Hendrix

We’ve all been there, right? You’re doing your thing, working for IBEX West, a computer company that handles a lot of big contracts, finalizing your divorce from your morphine addicted wife, Lollie, maintaining your membership in a few groups — the Museum of Modern Art, a board gaming crew, the SSAA (Society for the Study of Ancient Arts). I mean, you’re just a normal guy, you know? And then you get a letter from your Dad. Maybe it’s the fact that the letter is stuffed through your mail slot by an undead Revenant the police immediately gun down? Maybe it’s the fact that the letter says your Dad is coming to town? But it’s probably the fact that your Dad is Dracula, that really gets you down.

Welcome to the life of Vladimir Horescu, whose Daddy issues are even worse than yours.

Vladimir’s just a normal guy, you know? A software engineer whose marriage fell apart due to his wife’s morphine addiction, he still loves her because she’s emaciated and pale and reminds him of a corpse. Did I mention that Vladimir is a necrophiliac whose most intense erotic experience was feeling up his foster mother’s boobs after she died? Well, it was and he is. He has been making progress with the help of his therapist but this letter from Dad immediately reduces him to a sweaty-palmed adolescent again. Then, Lucifer shows up.

Lucifer is an old guy in a white suit with an epic beard, the “fallen angel, giver of knowledge...symbol of life’s urgency, patron of the desire for growth...the bearer of human motivation.” But he prefers to be called “Bill.” Jolson, Vladimir’s Tibetan manservant, grovels at Bill’s cloven hooves, but Vladimir just wants Bill to tell him what his Dad’s like since he’s never spent that much time around him. Bill assures Vlad that his Dad is the absolute embodiment of all evil, lust, entropy, and decay, then asks if he'll spy on him. For some reason, Bill is deeply opposed to Dracula but he can’t fight the Prince of Darkness because vague reasons. Instead, he needs to “absorb and contain” him. Remember those words.

Vlad agrees, especially after Bill sends him a very tall freelance journalist named Margaret to assist. Together, Margaret and Vlad decide they need to visit Vlad's mother in the mental institution where she’s been confined ever since she gave birth to Vlad. Have you ever really thought about Dracula’s penis? Length, girth, whether or not it has glowing yellow eyes? Is it capable of independent movement? Can it talk? John Shirley has thought about Dracula’s penis quite a bit, and so has Vlad’s mother. Just seeing it drove her insane:

“I could see his need bulging,” she tells them, which is exactly what you don’t want to hear about your Dad’s wiener. “I could see the outline of his black thing writhing like a separate animal, trying to escape his clothing...snapping like an angry snake...His organ moved like an animal tied to his waist...nosing into me like an angry tomcat, damp, hard as iron yet it whiplashed like a moray eel...I glimpsed it just as it entered, the two cold golden eyes on its snout, and it was big as a cat.”

So let’s see if we’ve got this right: capable of independent movement? Snaps its urethra like a mouth? Angry? Two glowing yellow eyes? No wonder Vlad’s got Daddy issues. Needless to say, he’s in no hurry to see Dear Old Devil Dicked Dad, and he keeps putting off heading over to the house Dracula’s rented, claiming he probably hasn’t moved in yet. Margaret has evidence to the contrary. Rapes in San Francisco have spiked, which is a sure sign Dracula’s in town. “He’s exerting a psychic influence to effect an outpour of rape,” she says, but Vlad doesn’t think so. Then what about all the ritual murders, Margaret points out? Surely that means Dracula is here? But Vlad has an answer for that, too:

“I don’t think there’s any solid reason to tie the ritual murders to Dracula. The central-northern coast of California’s been notorious for that series of slayings for, oh, almost a decade now. Bodies washed up without their heads, with the same insignia carved into each one’s chest. They never found all of Manson’s family, so maybe they’re behind it. Or La Vey and the Satanists. The blood missing from the bodies could have been sucked out by natural sea parasites.”


But eventually he runs out of natural sea parasites to blame and has to drive up to the beachside fixer-upper he bought a long time ago and modernized. Dracula’s hanging out there and wrecking the place with his new friends, like Undine, a sea cucumber with four, beaked breasts who eats humans with her nipples. These slobs have completely trashed the property with all their Revenants running around, and the revolutionary political leaders they’ve impaled on giant wooden stakes driven up through their butts down in the paneled basement which Vlad just had redone. Like all Dads, Dracula has zero fashion sense, greeting his son in a white suit with gold dollar sign cufflinks, sprayed curly brown hair, and a thick monobrow. 
“I am the avatar of all lust,” he croons, before putting out his cigarette on the forehead of his servant, Toltin. “I can scent the exhalation of a clam,” he brags, although why would you want to? Then his 4-inch fangs extend from his gums like “sudden erections.” Dads, right? They’re totally embarrassing.

And this Bad Dad has a master plan. He’s going to take over a big chunk of Brazil and turn it into his new Transylvania, and he’s already got the Brazilian cabinet coming up to meet him via submarine (with a large red X painted on the front so the Undine knows not to nipple its sailors to death). He’s supplying Brazil with Revenants to put down an uprising in the countryside, and in gratitude the Brazilian government is giving him 40,000 square miles of wilderness where he can found his kingdom of bullshit. But Dracula needs Vlad to make it happen. IBEX West has designed a computer for the State Department that determines how much government funding each foreign country deserves, but it’s been programmed by liberals who like human rights because they’re sissies and so Brazil, with its anti-revolutionary army of undead Revenants, is going to lose all its funding unless Vlad sneaks into the office and sticks a special fake circuit board into the computer that interprets fascist activity as ANTI-fascist activity, meaning the more Brazilian freedom fighters Dracula’s Revenants kill, the more money Brazil gets from the State Department.

Despite Dracula’s presence inside his head (and don’t we all have our Dads inside our heads, controlling us and making us pawns in evil plots to oppress foreign populations?) Vlad has a tricky double cross planned: he’ll install the circuit board UPSIDE DOWN which means that it’ll read fascist activity as fascist activity, rather than as anti-fascist activity, and will DEfund the Brazilian government. I’m not sure that’s how computers work, but okay. Dracula is very upset about this betrayal but when he tries to kill Vlad he meets Margaret and immediately falls in love. He orders his minions to scour the city for her. What does she look like, they ask? “She possesses an aura of Divinity. She is many women at once and she has eyes that take the light like new razors.” So...pretty easy to spot? I guess?

Dracula is desperate to find this razor-eyed woman because he feels in his heart that Margaret is the only gal who’ll “accept me as I am” and since what he is is “the Dark demiurge, the Devil’s Son, the Immortal Impaler” there probably aren’t a lot of women who’re willing to put up with him, so you understand why she’s a keeper. A lot happens in this book, but to boil it down to its bare essentials, eventually Dracula invades the hospital where Vlad is resting, gets turned back by Vlad’s Tibetan yogi manservant who uses yoga tricks to make Dracula punch himself in the face, then the police shoot Dracula and paralyze him from the golden-eyed dick down, there’s a riot between anti-rape protestors and homeless men, Margaret has a change of heart, helps Dracula escape, then feeds him a bunch of bunnies, and when he regains his strength she reveals that she is actually Bill, Dracula’s arch enemy, and she is there to “absorb and contain him.” Then, Dracula crawls up her cavernous vagina and becomes one with the universe. 


Surprisingly, this is not the only vampire book to end with Dracula engulfed by an enormous vagina (see: Vampire Junction). This would give anyone who already has Daddy issues the heebie jeebies, and Vlad is no exception. By the time the book is over, he's confined to a mental asylum and only regains his fragile sanity after adopting an emotional support animal: a wire-haired terrier named Bobby. In an interview, John Shirley tries to explain why Dracula in Love is so weird: “I wrote it at a remarkably early age. I was about eighteen. It’s a very intense, twisted book fueled by my adolescent sexuality, which was running my life.” But there’s a simpler explanation: “At the time, I was living in Portland,” he continues.

Say no more.