Interview - Jonathan Green on Dracula - Curse of the Vampire

Hello! Today sees the launch of a kickstarter for a new gamebook wriiten by acclaimed author Jonathan Green. Dracula - Curse of the Vampire promises a chance to play some classic roles in a different spin on the tale about everyone’s favourite undead.  The gamebook will be an interactive horror novel, inspired by the works of Bram Stoker, and will hopefully be Jonathan’s eleventh successful Kickstarter. It is going to be illustrated by accomplished artist Martin McKenna (www.martinmckenna.net).

Dracula– Curse of the Vampire launches on Kickstarter at 1:00pm (GMT) on Sunday 1st March 2020, and anyone who backs to receive a physical copy of the book within the first 24 hours, will also receive an art book of Martin McKenna’s artwork absolutely free. The Kickstarter will conclude on 31st March.

You can find out more about it here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jonathangreen/963934576?ref=b4yfgl&token=dcb9f441

Jonathan was kind enough to answer a few questions on the project

So how would you describe Dracula – Curse of the Vampire?

Dracula – Curse of the Vampire is an interactive horror novel, inspired by the works of Bram Stoker. In it, you play through the events of Dracula as one of the vampire-hunters – Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, and Dr John Seward – or you can take on the role of Count Dracula himself!

How exactly do gamebooks work? How does this apply to Dracula – Curse of the Vampire?

Gamebooks make YOU, the reader, the hero of the story. YOU decide which path to take, which perils to risk, and even which monsters to fight. The game aspect comes in the form of a simple set of rules that help to simulate combat – by rolling dice or picking playing cards from a standard deck – as well as testing whether a character is capable of accomplishing a particular feat.

Where Dracula – Curse of the Vampire differs from most gamebooks (as with my other ACE Gamebooks) is in the way it allows the reader to become one of the characters from the original story. However, they do not need to make the same decisions that person did in Stoker’s book, and that is where my adventure introduces new elements to the tale.

And of course the biggest difference is that you can play as the eponymous villain, Count Dracula, and try to defeat those who are out to thwart your plans of empire-building and domination. This means that there will be surprises in store, even for people who know Bram Stoker’s original gothic masterpiece inside out.

What was the appeal of a Dracula-based gamebook?

I’ve written over 20 adventure gamebooks since 1992. I started the ACE Gamebooks series in 2015, with the publication of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland, an adventure in which you guide the heroine of Lewis Carroll’s much-loved classic through an increasingly nightmarish version of Wonderland. Since then I have adapted other classics of literature in similar ways – The Wicked Wizard of Oz, NEVERLAND – Here Be Monsters! (which merges J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World), Beowulf Beastslayer, and ‘TWAS – The Krampus Night Before Christmas.

It was while I was working on these other titles that I decided Dracula would work well in a similar vein. The particular appeal in writing Dracula – Curse of the Vampire of course is that you can play as the bad guy, and win! I am hoping that potential readers will agree.

How do you design a gamebook? What is the biggest challenge for you?

It takes a long time but, in a nutshell, I break down the structure of the original to create scenes for the adventure, and consider how the reader’s actions might dictate the course of the action. I am always careful to make sure I hit all the beats of the original. In the case of Dracula – Curse of the Vampire, this meant making sure I included such iconic scenes as Harker meeting the weird sisters in Castle Dracula, the wreck of the Demeter, and the gruesome fate suffered by Lucy Westenra. However, I have also restored the excised initial chapter of the book, which Stoker later published as the short story Dracula’s Guest, and I am going with the novel’s original unpublished ending, which is quite different from the one many people will know.

I am also adding some new material of my own, but always taking Stoker’s work as the starting point. So, if you should happen to meet a Werewolf during the course of the adventure, it will feel relevant and germane to the plot.

As well as making sure that I give the reader agency in the adventure, rather than just having things happen to them all the time that are out of their control, one of the biggest challenges is balancing the adventure, so that there aren’t too many difficult battles, or, if there are, that there are other ways around them.

What is your favourite take on Dracula to date?

I think it would have to be Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992, although I liked what Dracula Untold tried to do with giving Dracula more of a backstory, even if it didn’t entirely work in my opinion.

Do you have any other projects in the pipeline for 2020?

I do but nothing I can talk about at the moment, I’m afraid. The big project for the year is definitely Dracula – Curse of the Vampire.

If there was one book (not your own) that you love to recommend to other people, what would it be?

Anno Dracula, by Kim Newman, appropriately enough. I love what he did with reimagining the fates of the characters from Stoker’s original, mixing vampire myths from all over the world into the narrative, and populating his Victorian London with figures from both history and fiction. And of course Anno Dracula was only the beginning…