“It was a pitiful sight – he was reduced to desperately drink the blood of down and outs with lice ridden and snot-encrusted beards in the hope that they might be addicts and still have enough narcotics in their system to give him a kick,” says Les Guff, describing the last days of once feared Carpathian vampire Count Dracula. “Of course, by that time his fangs, along with the rest of teeth, had fallen out due to malnutrition and he was forced to hack away at their wrists with a blunt craft knife and try and suck the blood up through a straw he’d salvaged from a waste bin outside his local McDonalds.” Guff is the author of a forthcoming book, The Decline and Fall of Dracula and Other Tales of Monstrous Descent, which purports to trace the decline and fall of a number of once feared monsters and, in the course of a pre-publication publicity tour, has been discussing with the press some of his publication’s highlights, which include the story of Dracula’s descent from the heights of Transylvanian aristocracy to being a drug addled down and out on the streets of London. “It all went well for him when he first came to Britain – for a hundred years or so all he had to worry about was the occasional staking by one of the Van Helsing family. Luckily he always had enough acolytes to arrange a resurrection. But then the eighties rolled around again and it all went wrong,” mused the author. “All those City types and yuppies snorting coke – it was inevitable that when he started preying on them he’d get addicted himself – it was all downhill from there!”

Soon the vampire count was completely hooked, seeking bigger and bigger hits from drug-filled blood. “He found himself having to target heavier and heavier users in order to satisfy his cravings,” says Guff. “Eventually coked up blood wasn’t enough – he started going after users of harder stuff – crack, heroin, meth – to get his fix and, inevitably, it took its toll.” In thrall to his addiction, the count neglected his finances and estate, soon finding himself in debt. “Before he knew it, he’d been evicted from Carfax Abbey after the bank foreclosed on it – even his coffin ended up being taken by the bailiffs to cover an outstanding debt,” explains the writer. “After a period coffin-surfing at various undertakers, he found himself on the street. He tried to fashion a new coffin from cardboard boxes – his pockets filled with dirt from his homeland – but it disintegrated after some drunks pissed on it. He ended up sleeping the days away in skips in back alleys, emerging after dark in search of prey.” By this time Dracula was no longer the debonair figure of myth – a cloaked and top hatted charmer – but rather a scraggly bearded, begrimed and shambling figure dressed in rags. “He just couldn’t seduce the ladies as he once had,” says Guff. “Without the strength to turn into a bat or a dog any more, he was restricted to victims he could shuffle up on: other down and outs!” With his Eastern European accent, the count found himself, by the 2010s, being targeted as an illegal immigrant. “His lack of a work permit or any paperwork more recent than the nineteenth century, left him at constant risk of being deported back to Romania,” Guff claims. “A prospect which terrified him, as they still believe in vampires there and he would be at risk of being staked, whereas in the UK he was just seen as a filthy vagrant with anti-social habits.”

The count’s end finally came when he broke into a tanning shop and climbed into a sunbed, mistaking it, in his drug addled state, for a coffin. “Of course, when he pulled the lid shut, it automatically came on – when staff opened it up, there was just a pile of ashes in there,” Guff recalls. “Incredibly, Dracula still had a handful of acolytes and one of them tried to resurrect him by snorting some of the ashes, but it didn’t work, the count’s vampire blood having been so diluted by drugs. Apparently, he didn’t even get a high from it.” Count Dracula’s ignominious end isn’t the only tale of sad decline from monstrous heights that Guff’s book chronicles. Almost as sad are his claims as to the fate of Frankenstein’s monster. Once the terror of numerous middle European towns and villages, not to mention being a scientific marvel, the creature found itself reduced to being a chronically sick cripple. “In reaction to the heartbreak of being rejected out of hand by his monstrous bride, the creature fled to the United States, where he quickly found a lucrative new career as a male escort,” says Guff. “He became very popular with society ladies – not only was he physically huge in every sense, but when he connected his neck electrodes to the mains and charged himself up, he sported a massive glowing erection.”

Many of his clients complimented the Monster on his ‘electrifying lovemaking’ skills. “They were always especially keen to make love to him during electrical storms,” Guff reveals. “Apparently, lightning bolts would strike his electrodes, resulting in sparks flying off of his penis as he got down to business – the ladies found it very stimulating.” But the creature’s run of success eventually came to an end, as he found himself suffering serious health issues. “The problem lay with all those dodgy organs Baron Frankenstein had grave robbed when he built him,” opines the writer. “Inevitably, they started to fail and not only did he find himself too infirm to ‘perform’, but he also found himself spending increasing amounts of time hospitalised. The trouble was that, without work, he was unable to pay the bills. To make things worse, the Baron’s life-giving processes left him unable to actually die – he just got sicker and sicker, suffering more and more pain.” According to Guff, Frankenstein’s monster still lives to this day, eking out his days an invalid, living in a squalid bungalow in one of Los Angeles’ less salubrious districts, subsisting on Social Security payments and Medicare. “He spends most days slumped in a mouldering arm chair, wheezing away under an oxygen mask, watching reruns of old monster movies on TV,” says Guff. “The closest he gets to chasing villagers these days is when he hobbles to his screen door using his walking frame, in order to shout at the neighbourhood kids riding their bikes across his yard.”

Guff’s book, which is out next month, also chronicles the fall of various other monsters, including the extinction of the Creature From the Black Lagoon due to over-fishing and the Wolfman’s convictions for indecent exposure. “One of the weirdest is the fate of Kharis, the living mummy,” claims the writer. “When his supply of life giving tana leaves dried up, he was forced to try and find substitutes, raiding cannabis farms and getting addicted to skunk.” Worse still, the bandaged one found himself the recipient of a restraining order from the latest reincarnation of his beloved Princess Ananka. “She got tired of him keep crashing through her patio doors in the middle of the night and trying to carry her off,” says Guff. “Now he can’t go within two miles or a thousand years of her – he’s a broken mummy now, spending all day in his sarcophagus, refusing even to come out to strangle infidels.”