Short-listed for the 2004 Bennington Gate Fiction Award (Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards), Stoker's Shadow tells the story of the late Bram Stoker's surviving family members in 1922 as they struggle to come to grips with the dark undercurrents in the novel, Dracula. Florence, Bram's widow, is shocked when a German company Prana Films pirates her late husband's story for a film, Nosferatu. William, the son of Bram and Florence, is at first baffled by his mother's discomfort, but soon finds himself struggling with his own memories.

Mary, Florence's the free-spirited young Irish companion, is captivated by 1920s London and all its mysteries. She finds escape in her copy of Dracula, and forms an unlikely—and to Florence's mind a dangerous—bond of friendship with William.

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"Paul Butler understands very well what underlies this gothic tale...Butler's prose style is often lush-he describes post-Victorian London quite eloquently..."
The Globe and Mail 

"Stoker's Shadow is a stunning achievement that will doubtless gather to itself all praise." 
JoAnne Soper-Cooke, author of A Cold-Blooded Scoundrel 


"Though the vampires in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula cast no shadows, the author and the book certainly do. In Stoker's Shadow, Paul Butler explores this phenomenon in a unique blending of biography and dreamscape."
Dr. Elizabeth Miller, author of Dracula: Sense and Nonsense and A Dracula Handbook