Dispatch 36

The Vampire Prince

The one about Dracula, werewolves, and the rules of being a vampire. Dispatch 36 begins in Tucson, where the narrator has wandered into the Cathedral of St. Augustine and found himself on the phone with Fred, investigating the most famous vampire of them all. The trouble begins almost immediately: the historical Dracula was a fifteenth-century prince who committed extraordinary acts of cruelty, but apparently wasn't a vampire. As the narrator wanders among the cathedral's candles and shadows, the brothers attempt to establish a few rules. Could Dracula defeat a werewolf? What about several wolves? Does Superman qualify as horror? And if so, must they account for kryptonite in Transylvania? Fred's questions are not always helpful, but they lead to a surprisingly detailed examination of the original Count Dracula: sunlight, garlic, crucifixes, invitations, native earth, transformations, and a rather substantial moustache. The investigation turns darker when the narrator recalls the real people who once believed vampires were rising from their graves. Families devastated by illness opened coffins, encountered the unsettling processes of decomposition, and interpreted what they found as evidence that the dead were feeding upon the living. The familiar rules of vampire hunting were not always entertainment. They emerged, in part, from frightened people attempting to explain and stop something they did not understand. Then comes the larger confusion. Bram Stoker borrowed Dracula's name but left important questions unanswered. Later generations supplied their own answers, creating new histories, romances, abilities, and limitations. From Lugosi and Christopher Lee to Anne Rice, Coppola, and Twilight, Dracula has become a collection of characters sharing an increasingly elastic identity. At its center, The Vampire Prince is about the strange relationship between history, folklore, and invention. Stories accumulate around people until the inventions become more familiar than the originals, and even the rules we think we know turn out to belong to different tellings. By the time the narrator and Fred have settled their argument, Dracula has won a contest that was never particularly close. And somewhere inside the cathedral, a dark stairway offers one more mystery worth investigating.