Nosferatu, the novel by Jim Shepard, has come back to life after seven years. The University of Nebraska Press includes an introduction by Ron Hansen in this 2005 paperback release. The first incarnation of this novel was published, in hardcover, by Knopf in March 1998. Also in 1998, Faber & Faber published a British paperback under the title, Nosferatu In Love, an edition with a whimsical cover (a jaunty Nosferatu waving a long-fingered claw; if you check it out at Powells.com, I swear you can hear Nosferatu calling, “Hey HEY hey!”). Despite having two previous covers to build on, the designers of this paperback version went for gothic literal (haunted-house font on top of an amateurishly grainy movie still of Max Schreck as the Nosferatu). I mention the cover because it sends an unfortunate message, that this book is nonfiction, when Ron Hansen’s introduction exists precisely to remind us that Shepard’s book is a novel, not a collection of essays about the famous movie by the German director F.W. Murnau.

In 2004, Jim Shepard published a book of stories, Love and Hydrogen, and a novel, Project X, which concerned a school shooting. Shepard is no stranger to that enduring strain of postmodernism in which fact beds down with fiction to make literary love of a most messy and curious sort. Nosferatu is this kind of book. The title story of Love and Hydrogen features the romance of two men who flirt on the Hindenburg as the day of flames draws near. Fact and fiction, like love and hydrogen, combine to dramatic, if not also disastrous, effect. The romance of two men in this story is predated by the romance of F.W. Murnau and Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele in the earlier Nosferatu. This romance—and its attendant betrayal and loss—provides the grieving core of this novel. F.W. Murnau, the character, mourns the loss of his friend and lover for the entire novel and, presumably, his entire (real) life.

The Hindenburg was real, but Shepard invented characters to write his story, “Love and Hydrogen.” F.W. Murnau was real, and so was his movie, Nosferatu. So what else, here, is fact? The question can be a bit of a nag as it tends to pop up regularly. While readers are advised to surrender their curiosity about what is real and what is not as they read this novel, they are unlikely to be able to fully do so. By titling the book, Nosferatu, and featuring F.W. Murnau as the main character, Shepard establishes three big expectations.

Expectation #1: This is a book about the movie Nosferatu in the same way that the movie, Shadows of the Vampire (2000), starring John Malkovich and Willem Defoe, was. Reality #1: No, it’s not. The movie gets wonderful treatment in the book but only for 30 of the 212 pages. Max Schreck does not appear until page 101 and is not described until page 105. He does not figure prominently in the novel. He remains a very minor character. The legend of the Nosferatu operates in the novel not as a literal person or film but as a metaphor for the character of F.W. Murnau, a haunted grief-stricken man who tends to suck the joy out of the people around him as he produces cinematic masterpieces.

Expectation #2: The novel is a dramatic reimagining of the legend of vampires. Reality #2: No, it’s not. It’s about the tragic life and brilliant career of F.W. Murnau, the film-directing genius. Forget the vampires already. Nosferatu the novel is told partially in journal entries, which echoes the forms of Murnau’s films Nosferatu and Tabu. It switches between these entries and a third-person narrative that sticks close to Murnau’s personal experience. Expectation #3: Well, so this is totally made up in some way, right? Reality #3: I don’t know. I fact-checked a lot of the information about Murnau’s life and his films, and most of it seems to check out. A few facts (like whether the cinematographer actually invented the gyroscope camera) I couldn’t determine (although I did learn that Robert Flaherty developed Akeley gyroscope cameras to shoot his movie Nanook of the North; this matters because in the novel, as well as in real life, Flaherty participates, badly, in the production of Murnau’s film Tabu). But I did discover that, yes, Murnau and his cinematographer were pioneers in many areas of camerawork (the moving camera, for example).

So here are facts you will probably want to know before you read this novel. If you are like me and have never seen Nosferatu let alone any of Murnau’s other films and, therefore, know next to nothing about Murnau and his life, you will want some grounding before leaping into the fascinating world of this novel. Or not. Maybe you want to just read it cold. If so, stop reading this now. (I should also say that reading Shepard’s novel will make you want to see Murnau’s films; if you are so inclined, you can buy the Murnau DVD Box Set which includes Nosferatu, The Last Laugh, Faust, Tartuffe, and Tabu.)

F.W. Murnau was born Friedrich Wilhelm Plump on December 28, 1889, in Bielefeld, Germany. Murnau studied philosophy, art history, and literature at the Universities of Heidelberg and Berlin. (I’d tell you how he changed his name to Murnau, but that’s one of the things that make the novel fun reading.) Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The widow of Bram Stoker sued for copyright infringement, and Murnau lost the lawsuit. All prints of the film were ordered destroyed, but bootleg prints were preserved. The film inspired Werner Herzog to remake the film in 1979.

The Nosferatu is a living corpse with rodent features and is associated with rats and plague. A bite from the Nosferatu does not convert victims to vampires. Victims simply die. The word Nosferatu comes from the old Slavonic word nosufur-atu, which is derived from the Greek nosophoros, which stands for “plague carrier.” (It helps to Google.)

The Last Laugh or The Last Man is often voted one of the greatest films of all time by critics. According to Roger Ebert, the film made the best use of the moving camera then to date (the first documented use was in the movie, Second-in-Command, made ten years earlier). The moving camera was used by Murnau to recreate subjective points of view. In this movie, the camera tracks down an elevator and through the lobby and outside, maintaining the point of view of the main character, a doorman whose demotion is the tragedy of the film. Apparently, Murnau and his cinematographer, Karl Fruend, really did do crazy things with the camera to achieve subjective points of view. They tied the camera to an extendable ladder, to a bicycle, on a makeshift cart, and even around the belly of the cameraman. (Karl Freund would later film Metropolis (1926) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).)

After producing a series of groundbreaking films, Murnau was offered a contract in Hollywood; he made Sunrise in 1927, Four Devils in 1928, and City Girl (also known as Our Daily Bread) in 1930. He then broke his contract with Fox to begin a ten-year contract with Paramount. His next film, Tabu, was his last. Tabu was made as a silent film three years after most of Hollywood had switched to talkies. (Cinematographer Floyd Crosby would win an Academy Award for his work in Tabu.) The only other major silent film released in 1931 was Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. Before Tabu premiered, Murnau was killed in a car crash in Hollywood on March 11, 1931. So those are the facts. And sometimes you need to know the facts. But facts don’t do justice to the feel of life. And that, I suspect, is why Jim Shepard wrote a fictional biography of F.W. Murnau, a strange breed of man who made compelling art from life and whose life, it turns out, makes compelling art.