Stop me if you've heard this one: while traveling through central Europe, a modern English lawyer gets entangled in the machinations of a demonic vampire and must call upon aid both natural and supernatural to defeat the creature and save civilization from a foe whose existence that civilization does not accept.
While that is, indeed, in broad terms the plot of Bram Stoker's classic Dracula, it is also the plot of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson's new novel, A Bloody Habit(Ignatius, 2018). The novel is, in some respects, an homage to Stoker—every chapter begins with a quote from Dracula and characters make frequent reference to the novel, culminating in Stoker himself making a cameo appearance towards the end. But mostly, it's a novel of suspense and action, a grand adventure story told with imagination and faith in grace. Thankfully, the intertextuality is handled deftly and does not distract from the plot. In less skilled hands, it could have made things campy or made the similarities seem excessive.
Instead, A Bloody Habit and Dracula are in a kind of dialogue over theology. The Catholic themes of Dracula—the efficaciousness of sacramentals and the Sacraments against the Count and vampirism's dark mockery of the Eucharist must be set against Stoker's lack of understanding of Catholicism. Rereading the novel once a year, as I do, Van Helsing's treatment of the Blessed Sacrament never fails to make me wince or roll my eyes, as his characters commit sacrilege to fight evil and Van Helsing thinks that an indulgence means he has leave to take dozens of consecrated Hosts and carry them about his person. According to Bruno Starrs, Stoker was a member of the Church of Ireland and debates remain about his intentions with the religious symbolism and allegories in Dracula.
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