Children of the Vampire

Both a prequel to Bram Stoker's Dracula and a sequel to Kalogridis's own Covenant with the Vampire (1994), this second novel in a projected trilogy suffers by comparison to both. Arkady Tsepesh, the protagonist of Covenant, flees the castle of his great-granduncle, Vlad, Count Dracula, but he can't elude the influence of the vampire bite that has bound him to his sire, as it has the firstborn male of each generation of Tsepeshs for the past four centuries. Meanwhile, Arkady's wife, Mary, who has given her husband up for dead, moves to Amsterdam and marries Doctor Jan Van Helsing. Neither Stefan, her son by Arkady, nor Abraham, whom the Van Helsings have adopted, have reason to suspect they are not blood brothers until the family curse draws Stefan to Vlad's castle in Transylvania. Gratuitous scenes of sex and violence perpetrated by the merciless Vlad and Arkady's hedonistic vampire sister, Zsuzsanna, fail to alleviate the tedium of the narrative, told in diary format through a number of voices. Notwithstanding its occasional plot twists, this novel does little more than rehash the plot elements of Covenant with the Vampire while setting the stage for events that will occur in the last book in the series. Translation, performance rights: Scovil, Chichak, Galen Literary Agency.(Oct.)