Prince Dracula: Son of the Devil

by Douglas Myles

Details the little known story of the historical figure behind the legend of Dracula, a Romanian prince who repulsed repeated Turkish invasions and who slaughtered between sixty thousand and one hundred thousand innocent victims

288 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1988

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 1 out of 5]

The other guy already said it, but this is full of bizarre, gratuitous scenes of gruesome sex and violence, (even weirder, considering how gruesome the actual facts are) takes liberties, and generally reads more like fanfiction about Vlad the Impaler. It is bad, very very bad. Just get Dracula, Prince of Many Faces if you want to know about the real Vlad Dracula.

[Terry Bonner · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is very light reading. It paints some very broad strokes which approximate, to a limited extent, the life of Vlad Tepes. As a serious biography, it is next to useless. That said, it is readable and will serve as an introduction for most casual readers to the actual human being whose ruthlessness and blood-lust inspired Bram Stoker to appropriate his name for the icon of truculent, predatory, irresistible evil. The author takes great liberties with the facts, although he does get most the names and the vital dates right. He commingles facts and speculation in a very cavalier, and sometimes gratuitous, manner. For example, Myles implies without much subtlety that Vlad's three years spent as a royal catamite in the court of the Ottomans were the cause of much of his reign's brutality. There is, in fact, no evidence to support this assertion. Vlad and his brother Radu did indeed spend three years as royal hostages in the Islamic court of the Sultan, where it is recorded that Vlad was an obstinate and rebellious youth who was frequently chastised by his guardians. However, he was a "royal" hostage, which means he was basically a diplomatic surety bond which guaranteed the allegiance of his father, Vlad Dracul, to the Ottomans. It was highly unlikely that he would have been molested. Indeed, he almost certainly received an education which far beyond what he would have been offered by an European institutions of the time, and he appears to have received some valuable training in the fundamentals of government. Vlad's bifurcated reign was, to be sure, very bloody both to his opposition at home and to the Ottoman overlords abroad. However, he is still remembered by Romanians almost six hundred years later as a great patriot and a reformer. He impaled dissidents and prisoners of war, and he did arrange to have almost all the corrupt land-owning aristocrats burned to death en masse during the early months of his reign. These events indeed sound barbaric and even malignant to modern ears, but he was no worse than most of the feudal warlords on the frontiers of Christendom in the fifteenth century, where the question of Muslim sorties into Europe, and a permanent Muslim presence on the continent, was THE major political issue at most European courts. Of course, you'll get none of this from Myles. But you will get plenty of gore.