Excerpt

EDITOR'S PREFACE

My name is Quincey Harker. I was born to a pair of monster-killers, and named for a third, an American, dead before I drew first breath. He was called Quincey Morris, and this is his confession. I found it scrolled and wedged roughly into the great casket which held my parents' trove of papers: diaries, letters, transcribed conversations, all of which told the extraordinary tale of the much-deserved end of that most fearsome of vampires, called "Son of the Dragon," or Dracula.

The world is by now acquainted with this tale, and I will not belabor it. Suffice to say, I am convinced that my mother never read this troubling addition which you now hold in your hands, and I believe it might have broken her heart had she done so. I can tell you she fairly worshipped the Texan who wrote it, spoke of him in terms of hushed hagiology and would not hear against him a detrimental word.

I do not know how the document came here. It fell perhaps into the keeping of my father, a fastidious librarian at heart, whose disposition would no more allow him to destroy an important document, painful as it might be to those he held dear, than he could take an innocent life, and perhaps he tucked it in with the great mass of typescript for the good of posterity and of truth, in the hope that all those who might be ill-affected by its content would be long deceased ere it came to light.

Indeed, it was only upon my father's death (my mother having predeceased him by some years), while embarked on the task of sorting his affairs, that I happened upon it. Although I have no provenance for it, I wish to state clearly and firmly that I believe the document to be genuine, written by the hand of Morris himself, and its contents to be a difficult relating of a genuine truth.