It is well known that the cruel, ambitious monster of Bram Stoker's most famous novel was once Vlad III Dracula, Voivode of Wallachia — the Impaler to his enemies. A warlike leader in a warlike time: brilliant, charismatic, pious, and ferociously devoted to his country. 

But what came of him? What drove him to become a creature of darkness — an un-dead — and what use did he make of this power, through the centuries before his downfall?

Five new and established authors with roots in Central and Eastern Europe reveal a side to the literary world's greatest monster never seen before.