Fuentes clearly knew that farce can become repetitious, and he layers in perfectly realized glimpses of the relationship between Navarro and his wife, Asunción. He revels in the details of their boisterous love life and long breakfasts. He also adds emotional impact through an account of the drowning death of the couple’s son. “The sea never returned him,” Navarro says. “And so his absence was doubled. Asunción and I do not have any memory, as terrible as it would be, of a dead body. . . . I am incapable of hearing the break of a wave without thinking that a trace of my son, turned to salt and foam, is coming back to us.”

This sense of sadness becomes infused with creepiness and fear when Radu surreptitiously enters the couple’s sanctuary: “From then on, the bedroom was no longer mine. It became a strange room because someone had walked out.” Later, when Asunción goes missing, along with their daughter, Navarro chooses to interpret his search for them as “the greatest moment of our love.” But all is not as it seems, and the statement so misjudges his relationship with Asunción that those words encapsulate both the earnestness and absurdity of the novel.

“Vlad” inevitably shifts toward the Grand Guignol and the decadent despite such personal moments. A meal of organs, the glimpsed remains of a “huge, indescribable animal” and a cache of subterranean coffins are all vampire clichés, but somehow Fuentes refreshes tired tropes. The novel is genuinely scary.

The final act is ushered in with a sweeping litany of Vlad’s evil history, followed by truly unexpected horrors — including the gratuitous use of squirrels in a sequence in which “campy” and “surreal” more or less French kiss. When rodents are being shoved down your pants, you know things aren’t going to end well.