Kiely & Brown

Dracula and Luna Kiely & Brown

Metafiction based on the real history of vampirism beginning in ancient Ireland where the first vampire, Abhartach of Slaghtaverty bites Stoker who will emerge as the author of Dracula. After the Druid-led executions of Abhartach and the Hags of the Long Teeth in 545AD, Stoker bites Luna who becomes his nemesis and pursues her over many centuries. Luna inhabits the world in disguises as Hungarian serial-killer Erzébet Báthory, Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, Ellen Terry the Victorian actress and among others Deirdre Hewson, owner of Club Abhartach ultimate erotic experience in twenty-first century Dublin. Stoker's Odyssey on the trail of Luna is paralleled with his search for the Sacred Lance of Longinus. Journeys through blood, murder and eroticism bring Stoker from the kingdom of Vlad III in Transylvania, the French Revolution and the Marquis de Sade to Victorian London where he completes Dracula in the era of Jack the Ripper. After the trenches of the First World War he works on the first vampire movie, Nosferatu and moves into Himmler's Wewelsburg Castle among the Nazis. In 1945, he meets Alfred Hitchcock who is editing a Holocaust documentary for the US Military. Stoker's desire after centuries of evil is to change his vampire state and achieve the impossible: persuade Luna to join him beside the grave of Abhartach in Slaghtaverty, a real place fifty miles from Belfast.