CNN || A bloodier Dracula rises again

Move over, Edward Cullen.

Tell those bayou bloodsuckers from "True Blood" to step aside, too.

More than 112 years after he first climbed out of the coffin, the world's most famous vampire is back -- and he's bloodier than ever.

"Dracula the Un-Dead," released this month in the United States, is a sequel to Bram Stoker's 1897 classic written by Dacre Stoker, the original author's great-grandnephew.

The book, co-written by Dracula historian Ian Holt, picks up 25 years after the Victorian-era monster is supposedly killed in the original and is based in part on 125 pages of handwritten notes that Bram Stoker left behind.

But while many of the original characters are here -- troubled couple Jonathan and Mina Harker and vampire hunter Van Helsing among them -- the horror has gotten a 21st-century update. The sex and violence that Stoker deftly alluded to in the original are, at times, front and center in his descendant's sequel.

"You've got to keep in mind the perspective," said Dacre Stoker, a native of Montreal, Quebec, now living in Aiken, South Carolina. "The degree of sex and violence he had, in this very stuffy and conservative Victorian society, was cutting edge at the time. Even the exposure of a woman's flesh, the piercing of the flesh, was a metaphor for the sex act."

And with authors from Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris to Stephen King and Poppy Z. Brite having crafted their own, sometimes lurid, reworkings of the vampire legend, Stoker said he knew that the new book couldn't just be a straight continuation of the first.

"We've got to keep up with what other people are doing," he said. "Otherwise, our story would be toast."

Of all the books, movies and other tales to use Dracula's name throughout the decades, the novel is the first since the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie to have the Stoker family's endorsement and input.