The game of court tennis is quite obscure but one of its leading practitioners has blown up, as they say on the left coast. Dacre Stoker is a nineteen handicapper, meaning he’s in the top thirty or so among amateur players in the country (there are about a thousand) and plays out of the Aiken Tennis Club, a tiny, genteel outpost in South Carolina. He is also a board member, vice president and membership secretary of the United State Court Tennis Association, the body that governs the game. (He was a former top pentathlonist who coached the Canadian team at the 1988 Seoul Games.)

Dacre is also the great grandnephew of Bram Stoker and has co-authored a sequel to his great great uncle’s classic with Dracula with Dracula: The Un-Dead (Dutton). The book is enormous. It is a New York Times bestseller. It has gotten glowing reviews around the world. It has its own credit card. Dacre has gone on tour around Great Britain and Ireland (luckily the home of court tennis) and now around the U.S.

See http://www.draculatheundead.com/ and http://www.uscourttennis.org/