Aiken's Dacre Stoker will soon see five years of labor come to fruition.

Mr. Stoker, 50, has taken up the story where his great-granduncle, Bram Stoker, left off with one of the most famous horror novels of all time, Dracula . The completed manuscript of The Un-Dead has been picked up by publishers Dutton U.S., Harper U.K. and Penguin-Canada, according to a news release from Atchity Entertainment International. It will be released next October.

"I'm really honored," said Mr. Stoker, who is the executive director of the Aiken Land Conservancy, formerly known as the Aiken County Open Land Trust.

A native of Canada, Mr. Stoker knew of his famous ancestor but he didn't read his novel until he was in college. He said he was fascinated and intrigued by it.

Also in college, he wrote a paper about his great-granduncle's work.

It wasn't until he met Ian Holt, who became The Un-Dead's co-author, that work on the book began. Mr. Stoker and Mr. Holt used Bram Stoker's original notes, which are housed at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia. Bram Stoker's original title for Dracula was The Un-Dead.

"There are all kinds of notes," he said. "They are well-preserved. You could see when he'd use a character, it was crossed out."

Some characters and other tidbits were not crossed out; those pieces have become fodder for the novel.

Mr. Stoker remains tight-lipped about the plot of the novel; however, an Oct. 6 article in the London Guardian leaked a few details:

"The new book is set in London in 1912, a quarter of a century after the Count apparently 'crumbled into dust.' Vampire-hunter Van Helsing's protÃgà Dr. Seward is now a disgraced morphine addict, and Quincey, the son of Stoker's hero Jonathan, has become involved in a troubled theater production of Dracula, directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself. The play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents' terrible secrets, but before he can confront them his father is found murdered, impaled in Piccadilly Circus," according to the article.

The Un-Dead will be about 600 pages.

"I was thrilled by this page-turning story and loved spending time with those great characters -- Stoker and Holt did a fantastic job melding the old with the new, and I found the work to be a virtually seamless continuation of the original," said Laura Shin, the senior editor of Penguin-Canada, in a news release. "The story has all the hallmarks of a historical novel, but with a modern sensibility that gives it widespread appeal."

Dracula has been made into numerous plays, books and movies, but until a member of the family decided to write a novel the Stoker family had never given its seal of approval to any except the classic 1931 Bela Lugosi film.

As the novel was taking shape, Mr. Holt was also working on a screenplay. About a year ago, Mr. Stoker thought the filming would begin sometime this year.

"The producer and director really want the movie effort to follow the book," he said.