BLOOD COUNT

You would have thought that Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 baroque and daffy Dracula film epic was a sharp enough stake to keep fiction's greatest bogeyman quiet in his coffin for at least a generation, but no, he's risen yet again. This time, though, he's been reimagined with a bold Transylvania twist. Cast in the form of a journal spanning 20-plus years, Roderick Anscombe's first novel, THE SECRET LIFE OF LASZLO, COUNT DRACULA (Hyperion, $22.95), doesn't give us the long-familiar Bela Lugosi-to-Gary Oldman creepshow vampire, but instead a rather ludicrous, cash-poor nobleman, a mortal like the rest of us. Stripped of his supernatural trappings and presented strictly as a homicidal maniac-''an enthusiast of degradation''-this Dracula, whether by accident or by design, emerges here as the granddaddy, perhaps even the godfather, of modern- day serial killers. We first meet young Laszlo in 1866. A 23-year-old medical student just recently arrived in Paris from Hungary, he's eager to put his embarrassing provincialism behind him and become the ''epitome of culture.'' By day he occupies himself as a hardworking clinician, but by night-accompanied and goaded on by his cynical Austrian friend Lothar von Pick-he greedily samples the salacious side of life. ''Why does sin feel so natural, so inherent, so instinctual?'' Laszlo wonders (sounding like a character in a Bret Easton Ellis novel), and he is soon launched on a perilous campaign to ''stamp out the remaining embers of tenderness and do it systematically.'' When he murders his prostitute-mistress in a fit of jealousy, slitting her throat and then pressing his lips to the wound, Laszlo rapturously discovers his genuine nature. ''I am not monstrous,'' he declares, ''but quintessentially human and evil.'' (Seems like hairsplitting to me.) Soon afterward, his older brother dies suddenly, and Laszlo is summoned home to Transylvania to steward the depleted family estate and assume the title of Count Dracula. For more than two decades, he manages, somehow, to squelch his thirst for blood, passing his days in the drafty and dilapidated old castle and idly fulfilling his assigned role-which includes marrying his brother's saintly widow and dabbling in national politics. But his murderous personality eventually breaks loose, and at the age of 44, Laszlo embarks on a headlong killing spree, dispatching his victims, all of them young women, with a Turkish dagger drawn swiftly across their throats. While the evidence points to Count Dracula as the killer, no one, not even the investigating policeman, is willing to suspect a man who once risked his own life ministering to the townsfolk during a typhoid epidemic. (Laszlo does have his good points.) Instead, the superstitious locals are convinced that a vampire is living, so to speak, among them. Written in a credible pastiche of windy 19th-century prose (although the vocabulary occasionally sounds postdated: Would Laszlo describe an embrace as resembling a ''football tackle''?), Anscombe's story makes for a solid, frightening read. While it's too long by half, and prone to philosophizing, the novel's grand finale-replete with rioting peasants, galloping soldiers, and slashing sabers-is deliriously over the top. Still, as a villain, Laszlo can't hold a candle to Bram Stoker's original. B-

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