ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the following people for their invaluable help in the preparation for this novel:

In Romania:

My sincere thanks to the poet Emil Manu, and to his wife and family for their wonderful hospitality. A special thanks to Lucian and Joanne Manu for their friendship, insights, and for a peek into a Bucharest most tourists do not see. Also, a sincere multumesc foarte mult to Marius from ONT and to Ana Manole and her sister in the village of Ciofringeni for their kindness to strangers.

In the USA:

I would like to thank Gahan Wilson for the pleasant dinner conversation and the copy of his 1977 Playboy article, “Dracula Country.” It was the single best source for tracking down the real Castle Dracula. My thanks also to Keith Nightenhelser of Depauw University for sharing the research of Robert Cochran and Laszlo Kurti on the “politics of joking” in Romania and Eastern Europe. I would also like to thank Dana Gall for the Romanian instruction and Rodica Varna for keeping me out of a Bucharest hotel which had its walls shot out.

A special thanks to Byron Preiss and Richard Curtis for making me write about Dracula in the first place. And thank you to Chris Pepe at Putnam’s for her patience and enthusiasm.

In the USA, Romania, Hungary, and Austria:

An inadequate but sincere thanks to Claudia Logerquist for her research, linguistic skills, stamina, courage, and spirit of adventure.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my debt to Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, authors of Dracula: Prince of Many Faces, In Search of Dracula, and other works. Their writings have almost single-handedly renewed interest in the historical Vlad Dracula, and I recommend their books to the interested reader. (One caveat for the serious Dracula-seeker, however—the caption under the photograph of the only extant bust of Vlad Ţepeş on p. 170 of Dracula: Prince of Many Faces says that the statue is to be found in the village of Copitineni [sic]. In truth, the bust is to be found not in the shadow of Castle Dracula in Căpăţîneni, but across from the old palace grounds in Tîrgovişte some 100 km. away.)

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Thanks to the research of these men and other scholars, I can say that all of the memories I ascribe to Vlad Dracula in this book, with the possible exception of the Sacrament, are true.