In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Still trying valiantly to catch up, here...


1. Marcus Sedgwick (2006), My Swordhand is Singing - a YA novel set in seventeenth-century Transylvania and drawing deeply on local vampire and other folklore. The protagonist, a teenage boy named Peter, has to deal with his alcoholic, troubled father, the cold and poverty of life as a woodcutter in a Transylvanian forest, his feelings for two different girls and of course corpses rising from their graves. My main abiding impressions are of snowy forests, a night in a hut besieged by a vampire, and the family horse, Sultan, who is as much of a character as any of the humans in the book.

2. Tim Lucas (2005), The Book of Renfield: a gospel of Dracula - an attempt at giving Renfield a fully fleshed-out backstory explaining his life and character beyond what Stoker includes in Dracula. In essence, he's been being visited by a divine/demonic being whom he knows as Milady, and we later learn also manifests as Dracula, since his childhood. It engages very closely with Stoker's novel, using an epistolary format and incorporating chunks of the original text (printed in bold type to identify them). But I must say it isn't the backstory I'd have written for Renfield, and in particular I wouldn't have made Dracula so straightforwardly godlike. Some subtlety was lost, there.

3. William Trimble, ed. and Anna Berglund, trans. (2022), Powers of Darkness: the wild translation of Dracula from turn-of-the-century Sweden (read on Kindle) - this is the full, original, free adaptation of Dracula which the Icelandic version found a few years ago turned out to be only about the first third of. It's as much a completely different story as the loosest screen adaptations of Stoker's novel, in that although it does still cover its major outlines, it goes to some completely different places, and ends with Draculitz's (i.e. Dracula's) destruction in London rather than after a chase back to Transylvania. I can't begin to go into detail about it here, and indeed wrote a comparative review of this and the other English translation by Rickard Berghorn released a couple of months afterwards for the Dracula Society zine, Voices from the Vaults anyway, so my thoughts are on record elsewhere. But it was certainly an intriguing read, if not exactly brilliant literature. It's basically hastily thrown-together pulp fiction, padded out with passages borrowed from multiple sources (not just Stoker) and markedly interested in theories of evolutionary degeneration and the supremacy of a superior race. Not unusual stuff for the turn of the century. It will be interesting to see if anyone ever manages to solve the mystery of who wrote it, but a mistake to assume (as several people working on the question have) that the author would be the same person as the author of any of the texts which were plagiarised in the process.

4. Jeanne Kalogridis (1994) Covenant with the Vampire - not recommended. The essential set-up is that the main character and his wife return from nineteenth-century England to his ancestral home in Transylvania, where they are frustratingly slow to realise that the great-uncle and patriarch is a vampire (specifically, of course, Dracula). Later on, it transpires that the family covenant requires the latest male heir, now the main character, to help the vampire cover up his killings in return for him and his own family being protected. In fairness, once this comes out, the very dull process of slow realisation is replaced by a great deal of gory and transgressive detail, including dismemberments, incest and necrophilia. Let's just say that I really did not want to read the word 'thrusting' in that latter context.

5. Jim Shepard (1998) Nosferatu in Love - I picked this out of a box of books being given away by a colleague moving to another university, and it's absolutely the best book I read this year. It might as well be called 'Murnau in Love', as it's the story of his loves and losses over his lifetime - particularly Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele. The main narrative covers Murnau's youth in Berlin, the production of Nosferatu, Der Letzte Mann and Tabu, before a coda returning to 1915 and then his death in 1931. It's lightly unconventional in style without being overly mannered, in that it starts off in the third person, then switches to first-person diary entries from Murnau while shooting Nosferatu, and then moves between the two in the section on Tabu. Its characterisation is great and it's highly readable, but it's also extremely insightful about how silent film works and what it can do, on a level I'd usually expect to encounter in an academic book on film rather than a novel. E.g. in Murnau's diary entries: "We're no longer astonished by the technically unheard-of. We're surprised on those days the newspaper does not trumpet new breakthroughs. So we look for the fantastic within ourselves. We notice the child or the dog who walks to the mirror, caught by the miracle of the doubled face. We wonder: If this second self, the Other, were to come out of the mirror's frame?...." and "For the vampire's arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience." It of course also captures the context of Germany in the 1910s and '20s, including the First World War, post-war inflation, and growing antisemitism (e.g. Murnau and his classmates at Reinhardt's theatre school defend a Jewish student against an instructor's prejudices), and tries to show how some of this shaped Murnau as a film-maker. In flying school at the beginning of the war, Murnau begins to think about the implications for film of a moving perspective, like a plane flying through and across the landscape, and later develops camera tracks to try to replicate it for Der Letzte Mann. But the main impacts for him are of course the losses he experiences: "The war was drinking the blood of millions. Allmenröder was gone. Hans was gone. The war had taken his partner in sadness and, before that, his lover." Highly recommended to anyone who enjoys Murnau's films.

6. Robert Aickman, ed. (1966), The Third Fontana Book of Ghost Stories - bought serendipitously at an instance of the Leeds Alternative Market (a biannual goth market) because it was edited by Aickman and contains a story by him. I read it in the run-up to Christmas, because I like to make a point of reading compilations of ghost stories around that time of year, and discovered in the final few pages that the last story (Aickman's, 'The Visiting Star') actually culminates on Christmas Eve - though I think I ended up reading it on Boxing Day or something like that instead. Just the ticket.

7. Noël Montague-Étienne Rarignac (2012), The Theology of Dracula: reading the book of Stoker as sacred text - argh, this book was so frustrating! I bought it because I could see from Google that it had quite a lot to say about the references to Classical deities in Dracula (Demeter, Morpheus etc), and I wanted to read it for my Classical references in Dracula paper. It gives more attention to that material than any other publication on Dracula that I've seen, and contains some good insights. It also deals with various earlier vampire stories, especially the various theatrical and operatic adaptations of Polidori's 'The Vampyre', and makes good points about their pagan and mystical elements too. But unfortunately the author totally undermines the value of those points by writing throughout as though his reading of the text is a profound revealed truth. Basically, almost every sentence is like this, and it very quickly becomes unbearable: "Feet planted on the Earth, silhouetted against a darkening night sky that glitters with its brilliant inhabitants, crushed serpent, Little Dragon, at her feet, Mina presents an Isaian or Marian figure and returns the narrative to its beginning and the rosary." I would have abandoned it half-way through, except that I had to read so much of it for my paper that it then became a sunk-cost issue, and I persisted out of sheer bloody-mindedness so that I could say I'd finished it.

In a further effort to clear the review slate, here are the books which I read in 2020 but haven't reviewed and am clearly now not going to.


9. Ali Riza Seyfioğlu (1928), Kazıklı Voyvoda / Dracula in Istanbul, trans Necip Ateş (2017) - like the Swedish and Icelandic versions, this is a bootleg of Stoker's Dracula, published within Florence Stoker's lifetime, but quite clearly without her knowledge, and is the source text for the film Drakula İstanbul'da (1953; LJ / DW). I think what I like about it best is that because it was written from a Turkish perspective and the Turks know all about the Impaler Prince who gave Mehmed II a kicking, Dracula in this version absolutely is Vlad Dracula the Wallachian voivode, or Kazıklı Bey as the Turks called him, with no ambiguity about it.

10. Michele Slung (1993), Shudder Again - bought for the story 'When The Red Storm Comes' by Sarah Smith, which is about a young woman living in a seaside town shortly before the First World War who is made into a vampire by a dashing gentleman who shows her visions of the approaching future calamity from which she will now be safe. It was OK, but not quite as 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' as I'd hoped when I heard it described at a conference. The rest is a mixed collection of short stories from different eras, all broadly horror but ranging between serial killers, gothic horrors, and the generally disturbing, with a central theme of being in some way about the relationship between sex and death. One was Robert Aickman's 'Ravissante', about a painter's surreal visit to the home of a Belgian symbolist painter's elderly wife which is probably all a big metaphor for the narrator's subconscious and has a framing device as a found document.

11. Anonymous author for Galley Press (1981), The Dracula Collection - basically a collection of fairly low-rent vampire images, including the one of Louis de Pointe du Lac holding a candelabra used for the cover of the edition of Interview with the Vampire which I have, and strung together with a narrative about Dracula showing a curious human visitor to his castle around his family portrait gallery. But the framing narrative includes some great scenes where the narrator has to imbibe strange substances, enter into and travel through another dimension in order to reach Dracula's castle. A surprisingly compelling fantastical narrative for something I had zero expectations of, and which my friend S had found for me in a charity shop.

After reading Peter Tremayne's Dracula Unborn (LJ / DW), I decided it was finally time to read the book which had inspired it, and so many others like it, in the first place. I read Florescu and McNally's Dracula, Prince of Many Faces, which focuses on the historical Dracula, three years ago (LJ / DW), and for a long time have felt that I didn't really need to bother with this one, given that I've also already read multiple debunkings of it. But, given what a big impact it has had on Dracula-related fiction, I felt in the end that I needed to know for myself what had and hadn't come from here. As the title of my post shows, I read it in the updated and revised 1994 edition rather than the original 1972 version, but I think it is good enough. The authors did not revise their central thesis between the two, and indeed restate it proudly and enthusiastically in the updated edition, though the preface also lists various new sources of evidence which they consulted.

I was basically right that it's both poor literary analysis and poor history. A lot of statements about what Stoker knew about the historical Dracula are pure assertion or speculation. Phrases such as 'It is likely Stoker heard the legends connecting Dracula to this region' (Bistrița) abound. And much of the information about the historical Dracula is completely unreferenced, which is hopeless when the primary sources for him are so contentious. They need not just referencing but constant direct engagement and discussion to get anywhere. McNally and Florescu are sometimes capable of doing that, but not consistently enough, and in particular they seem to have a complete blind spot when it comes to Romanian oral folklore. They treat this a reliable source which can be used to 'confirm' stories from the manuscripts and printed pamphlets, without considering that the folklore legends may stem from people reading the same sources centuries ago. Regarding the location of Dracula's supposed grave at Snagov, they even literally say 'We are inclined to accept the idea that the actual grave was the one near the altar, the one sanctioned by local folklore - always a useful guide in resolving enigmas associated with Dracula' (pp. 113-4). No. You cannot do that. Oral history is just not a reliable source over those timescales.

I was right that this was where Peter Tremayne got the idea about a second castle in the Argeș valley, but this is one of the claims which McNally and Florescu only really have oral tradition to support. According to them, local tradition in the area of Poenari castle claims that the name 'Poenari' originally referred to an older castle on the opposite side of the river from the one visible today (pp. 66-67). They say that the older castle stood on the site of a Roman-era fortress, and that its stones and bricks were used by Dracula to rebuild the castle on the other side of the Argeș now called Poenari. But they can't show any evidence of the older castle's existence - all they say to support it is that they were told about the remains of a low-lying wall at the bottom of the hill which might have formed part of its defences, and shown re-used stones in the local church and chimney-stacks and Dacian-period artefacts in the museum. There are no pictures even of any of these reused stones and artefacts, so it's basically pure hearsay, and they don't even claim to have seen the supposed low-lying wall themselves - only been told about it.

They are similarly vague and even self-contradictory about supposed underground passageways leading from the castle which is now called Poenari and out into the Argeș valley. The reality is that no such passageways are now identifiable, but they are convinced they must have existed nonetheless, because local oral tradition speaks of Dracula escaping from the castle that way in the context of a Turkish attack. So the tunnel is described on that basis (p. 72), and they also say that a visitor in 1912 reported seeing remains of the sunken passageway before the castle was damaged by an earthquake (p. 75), but don't say anything about who this visitor was or quote their account. As for who built it, they describe a winding staircase at Bran leading from a hidden stone covering next to the well in the main courtyard and out onto the knoll on which it stands, and assert that Dracula was so impressed by this that he installed something similar at 'his castle on the Argeș' (pp. 63-64). But, just a few pages later (p. 68), they claim that at the end of the fourteenth century, a Wallachian prince and his supporters retreated from the Tartars to the same castle, and when the Tartars stormed it they found nobody there, because the prince and his retinue had fled through secret passageways to the banks of the river. That story can only be true if there were already secret underground passageways at the castle half a century before Dracula's time, meaning that he had no need to install them himself.

Most of the book is like that. Much of the information in it seems interesting, but it crumbles on closer examination, just leaving you feeling irritated that you bothered in the first place. That said, I did notice for the first time thanks to this book that the St Gall manuscript about Dracula, a translation of which it contains, compares him directly to Herod, Nero, Diocletian and other persecutors of Christians. That's interesting, because I've been working on a theory for a while that quite a lot of the contents of the 'horror stories' which circulated about him is actually drawn from existing traditions about other tyrannical monarchs, and that sort of direct comparison confirms that at least some of the writers knew what tradition they were writing in. I also learnt from this book that one of the best-known portraits of Dracula comes from a collection at Ambras Castle in Austria specifically put together as a collection of curiosities by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Tyrol, which also includes the well-known portrait of the so-called wolf-man, Petrus Gonsalvus and his children. I knew it was called the 'Ambras portrait', but wasn't aware of that wider context, which is of course very typical of how almost every aspect of Dracula and his story has been perpetuated over the centuries. The castle, and Innsbruck where it is located, both look lovely, so I must try and go there some time once that sort of thing is possible again.

This is a collection of short stories whose author is known in this parish as sovay. I hope she won't mind if I proceed to just call her S for the rest of this review, a) to save myself having to keep typing out the code for sovay, and b) to signal that I'm writing about her in a different way here anyway, which bridges both sovay, the DW friend, and Sonya Taaffe, the author.

We've been DW friends for a few years now (probably about four-ish?), and I have been following S's writing career all that time. It is obviously a big passion and a serious commitment for her - she regularly posts to say that she has had an individual short story or poem published, attends readings and cons to present / talk about her work (in pre-COVID times anyway), and of course reported the publication of this book a couple of years ago. I've been a little slow to get round to acquiring and reading it, but not because I had any doubt that it would be good. I'd already read a couple of the individual stories in it anyway which S had shared, and been extremely impressed. I'm just slow, is all.

I've never met S in real life, as she lives in Boston, but she tells her DW readers a lot about herself, and has clearly put a lot of the same self into her stories too. So I had very much the same experience reading this book as I did when reading my friend Andrew Hickey's novel Head of State (LJ / DW) of recognising the person I know through DW in the stories. S's passion for the sea, knowledge of Classical myth and literature, Jewish heritage, and queer identity are all here, combined with a fine-detail observation of urban landscapes and a sense of colour and the best words for conveying it vividly which really struck me in the first of her stories that I read.

I'm not going to write about every single story, because there are twenty-two in the book altogether, but ( here are some notes on my favourites ones and what I liked about them )

In short, a very impressive and enjoyable collection which I highly recommend. S has a real gift for taking established literature, myth and history, combining it with close observation and transforming it into something completely new and unexpected. Here's to her further success as a writer.

This is the second book I read for the now-unlikely-to-happen DracSoc trip to Bath, again because its author lived there in the early to mid '70s. On one level it is a series of ten 'takes' on traditional fairy-tales, but even to say that rather over-simplifies and understates what Carter does with them. Most are entirely recast, reset, reframed - more riffs on the original stories than even retellings, and sometimes taking two or three iterations to explore different angles on the same archetype. All of them reflect her famously radical feminist perspective, but while that might now conjure up a vision of stories about women triumphing over patriarchy, perhaps with a queer emphasis, Carter's focus is more on demonstrating the workings of patriarchy, the ways in which women are often complicit in it, its damaging effects and (sometimes) the ways in which women can counter or escape from it. Most of the stories are also distinctly Gothic in nature, involving violence, the monstrous, isolated fantastical settings and a general sense of heightened drama and emotion. ( My notes on individual stories follow below )

So here I am with a weekend to myself for the first time in ages, but that isn't for good reasons, and it will probably be the first of far too many - if we're all lucky. I could sit here and write about the coronavirus, but for the sake of normality and mental health, here is a post about some ghost stories I read instead.

I started reading this collection a day or two before Christmas 2019, but I didn't finish it until after New Year 2020, so I'll count it as the first book of 2020. I have only knowingly read one Algernon Blackwood story before, which was The Willows, though I read a lot of horror short story compilations in my teens, so may well have read others. Anyway, I love The Willows, and what I love about it is that the scary supernatural entities in it are not ghosts or monsters in anything like the normal sense, but elemental forces or beings, seemingly from another dimension, which the human characters cannot see or understand. That really spoke to me and made for an immensely gripping and powerful story, so having read and enjoyed that one recently in isolation, I decided to make this, Algernon Blackwood's earliest published short story collection, the subject of this year's ghostly Christmas reading.

The table of contents runs thus:

The Empty House
A Haunted Island
A Case Of Eavesdropping
Keeping His Promise
With Intent To Steal
The Wood Of The Dead
Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House
A Suspicious Gift
The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York
Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp

Precis of all the stories (and more) may be found here, while the whole collection is online here. Some, such as The Empty House, A Case Of Eavesdropping and Keeping His Promise are standard-to-fairly standard ghost stories, though certainly very well done and typically leaving me feeling pleasantly on edge and unwilling to look behind me by the time I had finished them and was ready to turn out the light. But others reflect ( the same interest in the unknowable, the occult or the divine as The Willows )

Blackwood's interest in stories of this kind seems to be grounded in ( his real-world interests )

Two stories also place a significant emphasis on ( the act of story-telling itself )

Finally, again in line with the last Stoker novel I read and because it very much needs to be acknowledged, ( there is some full-blown racism in this collection too )

The General Election put a stop to my book and film review posts (and indeed to the watching of films in particular), so here's a stab at catching up.

This book is a sequel to The Vampyre: the secret history of Lord Byron, which I read a couple of years ago (LJ / DW) and really liked, despite not otherwise having much respect for the author. Where the first book was both about Lord Byron as a vampire and a pastiche of Romantic vampire literature, this one similarly features Bram Stoker as a character, is set in the 1880s, and plays around with a mish-mash of relevant literature and lore, including military memoirs of British India, the goddess Kali, Sherlock Holmes, Oscar Wilde, opium dens and (inevitably) Jack the Ripper. It's not particularly closely connected to the events of the first novel, but its vampiric Lord Byron does feature in the sequel, mainly concerned with tracing his descendants from his mortal life and trying to get unscrupulous doctors to investigate whether any cure can be found for his 'blood disease'. He goes under the pseudonym of Lord Ruthven, and his real identity is supposed to be a great mystery which one of the main characters decodes in a massive revelation - a device which obviously did not work for me, or (you'd think) anyone who had read and appreciated the first novel.

Like Stoker's Dracula, this novel is told via a collection of documents and letters, including Stoker's own journal, and we're obviously meant to understand that its events inspired him to write Dracula. He is the busy manager of the Lyceum Theatre during the period when the novel takes place, but befriends a doctor named John Eliot, who draws him into a web of vampiric goings-on. With Eliot, Stoker visits an asylum run by a Dr Renfield which houses an inmate who rips the heads off doves and smears herself in their blood. They also travel to Whitby to unravel mysteries involving Byron's human descendants, with Stoker's journal at that point echoing some of Mina's language from the novel - it is "a most lovely spot, built around a deep harbour, and rising so steeply on the eastern side that the houses of the old town seemed piled up one over the other, like the pictures we see of Nuremburg." Indeed, towards the end of the novel, we jump forwards in time to a point when he has written Dracula, and his correspondence about it with an Indian Professor called Huree Jyoti Navalkar (who seems to be intended as the in-story inspiration for Van Helsing) helps the other characters to work out what really happened during the main narrative, a decade earlier.

The vampire antagonist-in-chief, taking the place occupied by the Pasha in The Vampyre is essentially all of literature and history's female demon-goddesses rolled into one - Kali, Circe, Lilith - and calls herself Lilah for most of the story. There's an interesting gloss on the Kali-aspect of her, whom we first encounter in a fictional border region of India called Kalikshutra. One of the Indian characters carefully explains that the Kali of Kalikshutra is not the normal Hindu Kali, whom he describes as "a beneficent deity, the friend of man, the Mother of the Universe", but rather a quite different being, the "Queen of the Demons". That reminded me strongly of some very similar comments which I learnt from Kieran Foster's talk at the IVFAF vampire festival last year were made by Anthony Hinds in relation to Hammer's planned vampire film, Kali: Devil Bride of Dracula. Having spent time in India himself during the war, Hinds had realised that it would be quite offensive to portray the real-world Kali as an out-and-out demon, and dealt with this in the draft script by revealing that her apparent cult isn't actually anything to do with the real Kali at all, but rather a fraud perpetrated by blood-cultists. It looks like Tom Holland arrived independently at a similar realisation and solution.

Lilah lives in a massive warehouse in the east end of London, which can only be entered via an opium den in the upstairs room of antique dealership run by a certain John Polidori, her abject servant. Inside, the warehouse itself has an impossible, hallucinatory geography of shifting galleries and stair-cases, which weaves together the artistic and architectural influences of all the cultures in which she has ever been worshipped. Just as I'd found Holland's descriptions of the Pasha's castle with its accreted historical layers one of the strongest elements of The Vampyre, I found this warehouse one of the most striking aspects of its sequel too - though he also did a pretty good job on the narrow, foggy streets of the East End. Lilah is more powerful than the Pasha, though, generating the whole architecture of the warehouse as an illusion in the minds of those who enter it, and she likewise has the power (like Circe) to transform people too into whatever she wishes - usually something which she knows they themselves will utterly despise.

John Eliot, the maverick doctor whom Stoker befriends, starts the novel in Kalikshutra, shunning the ex-pat community and investigating the local blood-born disease, but then comes to London to treat the poor and downtrodden of the East End instead. He is partly Sherlock Holmes, leading investigations into Lilah using logic and deduction, and having been taught at Edinburgh by Joseph Bell, while Stoker is his Watson, making naive observations and suggestions which turn out to be of great importance. The Sherlock Holmes stories evidently also exist as fictional works within the novel, though, as one character recommends them to John, and when he has read 'A Study in Scarlet' he remembers Conan Doyle from his university days and realises he must have taken on board Joseph Bell's methods of deductive reasoning. During the middle part of the novel, John treats and helps women with the same names as Jack the Ripper's historical victims, but this is intended to have a dark pay-off. Eventually he is seduced by Lilah and transformed by her into Jack the Ripper - that is, what she judges the antithesis of everything he wanted to be - and is thus able to go out and murder the very same women he had been treating, because they already know and trust him. I suppose it's not the worst way to deal with Jack the Ripper in fiction, since in between his episodes of murderousness he does indeed suffer, as Lilah had intended, with the knowledge of what he's done / going to do. But I still just don't ever want to read about Jack the Ripper, ever at all, and found it very unpleasant indeed to have to be inside his head (as he was narrating it all in the first person in a letter) during those episodes.

Oscar Wilde features as a patron of the Lyceum Theatre, and indeed the novel's title is (sort of) taken from De Profundis, the long letter which he wrote to Bosie from prison, and which was published posthumously. But the relevant line there, in which he's talking about his association with rent-boys etc., reads: "It was like feasting with panthers. The danger was half the excitement." And indeed Holland evidently knew this, as his character of Wilde speaks more or less the same line during a dinner hosted by Stoker: "I prefer a beauty that is dangerous. I prefer to feast with panthers, my Lord." Given all of that, I really can't explain why the book itself is called Supping with Panthers, rather than Feasting with Panthers. (I should add that it does feature the occasional mention of actual panthers, living in Lilah's warehouse, but they're not a substantial element of the plot.) Meanwhile, Holland can't resist the conceit of sending a little literary influence back in Oscar's direction. At one point, Byron, with the insight of a true immortal, gives Oscar the idea for The Portrait of Dorian Gray by observing: "A face that did not age would be nothing but a mask. Beneath its show of eternal youth, the spirit would be withering, a hideous mess of corruption and evil."

In the end, it is vampire-Byron who defeats Lilah by drinking her blood, after which John Eliot / Jack the Ripper cuts out her brains and heart and the whole elaborate interior of the warehouse disappears, leaving behind only the very ordinary abandoned warehouse building it really was all along. Though we're given to understand that she probably isn't really dead forever, and will resurface some time in another guise, her hold over John / Jack does at least evaporate, so that he ends up as merely a vampire.

Overall, worth reading I guess if you like this sort of thing, but it never quite sang to me in the way the The Vampyre did - especially the earlier parts set in Albania and the Pasha's castle. Much like the latter parts of The Vampyre, it felt a bit too beholden to the weight of Holland's historical research, and probably more so in this case for attempting to weave together a wider range of late Victoriana. I'm kind of glad he didn't write any more sequels.

Just over a year ago, in June 2018, I went on holiday with DracSoc to Cruden Bay (formerly known as Port Erroll), a little fishing village on the east coast of Scotland where Bram Stoker spent several summer holidays and probably wrote most of Dracula. As part of the trip, we met up with local resident Mike Shepherd, who had been researching Bram's visits to Cruden Bay, and guided us around the place pointing out Stoker-related landmarks and explaining what he did there. At the time, he had basically finished this book and was in the process of looking for a publisher for it, so he walked around clutching sheafs of print-outs from it, and periodically reading relevant passages - mainly quotations from Stoker's work. Here's a picture of Mike talking to some slightly chilly DracSoc members about Bram walking up and down Cruden Bay beach and the inspiration he drew from the sight and sound of the sea, with just such a sheaf in hand:


The book was published later that year, went straight on my Christmas list, and now I have read and very much enjoyed it. Most of the information about Bram's visits there I knew already from what Mike told us during our trip (and which I wrote up after the holiday: LJ / DW), but it was nice to see a few extra historical pictures in the published book, and I also learnt a bit more than I'd fully grasped before about Cruden Bay's development during the years that Stoker was visiting. Basically, he was a bit of a pioneer, discovering the village by chance during a walking holiday when it was still very remote and isolated. But soon after his first stay there in 1894, major local developments began with the aim of turning it into the 'Brighton of Aberdeenshire' - and the name change from Port Erroll to Cruden Bay was part of this, as it was judged to sound less related to trade and hard work, and more charming and idyllic. Work began in 1895 on a local railway station which was completed in 1897, while a hotel and golf course opened in 1899. So as Stoker continued to visit annually, the village changed entirely from a quiet retreat to a popular resort full of contemporary notables. This was obviously great for the local economy, but changed things rather for Bram, and probably explains why on his last visit there in 1910 he stayed in a cottage at Whinnyfold, at the other end of the bay, which would have been markedly cheaper as well as quieter - particularly important for him by that time on grounds of ill health.

Alongside Mike's careful research into these sorts of historical details is a second thread to the book, which he hinted at during our visit but kept closer to his chest. This is all about how the natural landscape and local customs of Cruden Bay may have appealed to and inspired Bram, given his well-documented passion for the similarly nature-venerating and pantheistic poetry of Walt Whitman. There's certainly a basis for this. Whitman poems like 'On The Beach At Night Alone' and 'With Antecedents' do speak of the oneness of all things in nature, and the acceptance and syncretism of all faiths as reflections of a single spiritual truth. And Mike quotes plenty of examples and passages from Stoker's work which reflect similar thinking - e.g. Esse, the main character in his novel The Shoulder of Shasta, who is explicitly described as a pantheist, or the mystical / magical old woman Gormala in The Mystery of the Sea (which is set in Cruden Bay and which I need to read urgently!), whose beliefs are described as deriving from 'some of the old pagan mythology'. I found this helpful and interesting, and it certainly gave me more of a sense of what had impressed Bram so much about Whitman's poetry than Skal's biography (LJ / DW), from which you would be forgiven for concluding that it was wholly about repressed homosexuality. But I also think Mike might be indulging slightly in projection and wishful over-thinking when he makes statements like these:

"Bram discovered an entire world-view in Walt Whitman's poems and connected with them. This was an outlook that led from his childhood connection with nature and progressed to an acceptance of pantheism. This encompassed and subsumed the Protestant faith of his boyhood." (p. 179)

"I walk along the same beach every day trying to imagine what Bram Stoker was thinking when he walked there some 120 years ago. My suspicion is yes: Bram believed in a mystical universe, that land is the realm of the material world and the sea is the living embodiment of the spiritual world. It's essentially the age-old belief of the Port Erroll fishermen; that a nameless spirit resides in the sea." (p. 203)

"Here's what I think. Bram Stoker's spiritual outlook appears to be more or less that of Walt Whitman: it encompassed all religions past and present and rejected none. If a religious belief was real to the person that held it, then their gods and spirits were real to Bram Stoker. That the fishermen of Port Erroll could simultaneously hold Christian and pagan beliefs would be seen as natural by Bram." (p. 206)

I totally get where Mike is coming from on all of this, and I appreciate the way he has signalled this thinking as his own opinion, rather than verifiable fact. But the idea that Bram Stoker consciously identified as a pantheist in a way that 'encompassed and subsumed' his Protestantism, or believed that all gods and spirits were equally real, doesn't ring true to me from what else I've read about him (quite a lot by this stage!). He was certainly fascinated by other religious traditions and enjoyed probing at their implications in his creative writing. There's a very good article about the religious implications of Dracula (which requires a JSTOR subscription or library to access in full but has a reasonable abstract here), which reveals some fascinating unresolved and probably unconscious tensions and implicit dark undercurrents in the way Stoker portrays various Christian traditions and their relationship with (what were seen as) superstitions. That is, it's clearly all a locus of unease which he keeps circling back to, and I think it's perfectly accurate to say he was fascinated by and sympathetic to ideas like pantheism. But still, at face value he always remains resolutely Christian and indeed somewhat pious in his proclaimed outlook.

I didn't mind too much, though, because in the process of exploring the potential relationship between Stoker's beliefs and local pagan traditions Mike devoted two whole chapters to them - taking 'pagan' to mean pretty much anything relating to the veneration of nature, unnamed spirits, superstitions and anything not sanctioned by the church. Stoker himself does get rather left behind during those two chapters, which both more or less begin and end with brief comments along the lines of "this is the sort of stuff Stoker might have heard about or been inspired by when he visited Cruden Bay", but I was perfectly happy to read about them in their own right because I love that stuff. There were a few things which rang Wicker Man-ish bells for me, like a reference to Shoney, god of the sea (to whom Lord Summerisle offers barrels of ale). And I was particularly tickled, for surname-related reasons, to learn about the custom of the Goodman's Croft or Fold - a small area of agricultural land deliberately left untilled for the 'Goodman', a generic word for landowner here meant in the sense of a spirit living on the land. I've always understood it before just to mean (along with Goodwife) a wholly generic term similar to 'Gentleman', but I like the idea of it meaning a spirit of the land a lot more.

Overall a very interesting book which needed writing, which Mike as a Cruden Bay resident was the perfect person to undertake, and which will especially appeal to those who (like me) enjoy a bit of Scottish folk tradition as well as the work of Bram Stoker

This is a multi-authored novel which I picked up in Whitby when I was there with fellow DracSoc members last September. It's a response to both Stoker's novel and a lot of the wider mythos around it, particularly the life of the historical Vlad III Dracula, and like the original novel it uses an epistolary format (or modern equivalents) throughout. It consists of five main chapters (or dossiers of documents), each dealing with different periods and settings and each with their own individual authors, as follows:

• Bogi Takács, 'The Souls of Those Gone Astray from the Path' - set during Vlad III Dracula's imprisonment in Hungary, this mainly consists of letters between two rabbis, through which we learn how Dracula has been transformed into a vampire with the help of Mátyás Corvinus, and then fakes his own death on campaign in Transylvania and infiltrates the Hungarian court in the person of Mátyás' new wife, Queen Beatrix.
• Adrian Tchaikovsky, 'Noblesse Oblige' - covers the life of Erzsébet Bathory, who is preyed upon as a young woman by Dracula and whose response is to conceive an intensive loathing for him and spend her whole life equipping herself to fight against him by trying to unlock the secret of how to extend and take life from others herself via gruesome experiments. I.e. it is the classic "she hates him so much she becomes like him" narrative.
• Milena Benini, 'A Stake Too Far' - set during the vampire panics of the early 18th century, we follow a doctor sent out to Croatia on the orders of the Empress Maria Theresa to tackle the problem. The twist is that there really are vampires on the prowl in the area - Vlad himself, and his brother Radu, also a vampire and his sworn enemy.
• Emil Minchev, 'Children of the Night' - a single long letter from Vlad Dracula to an associate in London, relating how he is planning to move there to provide sufficient nourishment for his three daughters (the vampire women who live in his castle in Bram's novel), after they have drunk the area around his castle dry. Most of the letter is actually about their mother, a local woman named Yaga whom he discovered had supernatural powers and became his one true love, but who died shortly after giving birth to them.
• Caren Gussoff Sumption, 'The Women' - flipping mainly between the late 1960s and the present day, this tell the stories of Lolo, a descendent of the Szgany who served Dracula before his death, who has come to London to study and nearly becomes a victim of Mátyás Corvinus, and Dani, her trans daughter who is figuring out how to tell her mother who she really is as well as how to take on Corvinus herself.

The five stories are tied together by a framing narrative, in which a Jonathan Holmwood (born in 1947 to judge from his email address) sends Dani (of the last story) a series of files, each with a covering note, consisting of the dossiers of documents which make up the first four stories and which he has gathered himself over a lifetime of research into his own family's brush with Dracula. Given the multiple authorship, I found the collection as a whole surprisingly coherent - and of course an epistolary format featuring completely different characters writing each section helps with that, because of course their voices should sound a bit different anyway. I also really enjoyed the stories overall, both individually and collectively. The historical contexts were extremely well-researched (by which I do not just mean repeating 'facts' from primary sources, but sometimes also interrogating and deconstructing them too), the references to Stoker's novel (and occasionally other related fiction - e.g. golem stories, Le Fanu's 'Carmilla') were clever and well-informed without feeling over-played, there was loads of foregrounding of usually-silenced types of characters (Jews, women, trans people, Romany people), the characterisation generally was strong and absorbing, and the stories were full of intriguing scenarios and details.

However, I did find the fourth story broke my suspension of disbelief a bit. Dracula's true love, Yaga, proves to be a sort of spider-woman - she makes webs, paralyses and devours her prey, and gives birth to their three children in giant eggs, after which she explains that they have to eat her as their first meal, and that in order for them to do so Vlad has to kill her himself with his own bone, having stripped the flesh off his finger to do so. I know it seems silly to be complaining about the unrealism of magical spider-ladies in a novel about vampires, but there it is. She was just a step too far for me, and then it didn't help that in the fifth story, Dracula is just unceremoniously dead (I think we're supposed to understand that the events of Stoker's novel have happened to him between the fourth and fifth chapters), and instead the enemy has become Matthias Corvinus, but the novel ends before any kind of confrontation even with him. So, cool as both Lolo and Dani are as characters, and for all that Dani does get to come out to and be accepted by her mother, any kind of final reckoning - or even meeting - with the big vampire villain is just missing. Maybe there will be a sequel?

I received these two volumes of graphic adaptations of M.R. James ghost stories for Christmas, and had read both before the end of Boxing Day. John Reppion, one half of the production team, spoke about how he and Leah Moore had approached the stories and showed us some of the artwork from them at the M.R. James conference I went to in York in late September, and I was impressed enough by what I saw to put them on my Amazon wish-list in anticipation of Christmas. My sister did not disappoint, though opening them on Christmas day at her house proved a little dicier than I had reckoned when Christophe (four years old) saw them, realised that they were basically picture-books and demanded a story... I solemnly obliged, but thankfully (as I'd felt pretty safe in predicting), he'd got bored and wandered off by the end of the second page of 'Count Magnus' - though not before having cause to ask what a 'mausoleum' was!

They contain the same eight stories as the original James collection of the same name, four per volume, but with each story drawn by a different artist in their own distinctive style. Drawing the stories of course forces particular artistic decisions which writing them can elide - particularly whether or not to show monsters which James deliberately only partially describes, or events which are only implied such as Mrs Mothersole transforming into a hare in 'The Ash Tree' - and it was the intelligence with which John talked about the reasoning behind these decisions at the conference which was one of the main factors that made me want to read the books for myself. On the whole, the lean is in favour of showing the monsters (though not Mrs Mothersole's transformation), but usually sparingly - e.g. only partially (like James himself) or not until the very last panel. I think it is the right decision, and actually more Jamesian than not. For all that he argued for treating ghosts 'gently', he does also like to deliver what I have heard called 'the Jamesian punch' - that is, those few very evocative words with which he conveys utter grotesque horror after a long and tense build-up, such as “a mouth, with teeth, and with hair about it, and, he declares, not the mouth of a human being”.

The pleasure of good M.R. James adaptations is that they make you see and appreciate things which you might previously have missed in the stories. I got the same out of the Radio 4 adaptations written by Mark Gatiss which were broadcast in the run-up to Christmas, of which 'The Mezzotint' particularly inspired me to realise in a way I never quite have before how much the story capitalises on and plays around with the subjective real-life experience of viewing art. I think it was having different people playing the various roles (Williams, Binks, Nisbet, etc.), and commenting on the different things which each of them had seen in the picture, that really brought that out, in a way that reading it yourself or hearing a single narrator like Robert Lloyd Parry read the whole thing isn't as likely to capture. Likewise in this collection, I found I appreciated the structure and menace of 'Count Magnus' more than I usually do the written version, and that my rather jaded over-exposure to 'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You' was overcome by the freshness of experiencing the story in a new medium, with characters whose faces I hadn't seen before. There is also lots of charming detail to soak up in the panels, delivering content not conveyed by either the original stories or the inset narrative bubbles such as images of pages from the manuscripts the characters are poring over or details of the rooms and other locations they inhabit. I can highly recommend both volumes, and hope that John and Leah feel inspired to progress on to some of James' other stories at some stage in the future.

That now concludes my books read for 2018 in the sense of books finished. I selected a volume of ghost stories by Elizabeth Gaskell for the run-up to Christmas, also lent to me by lady_lugosi1313, having enjoyed doing the same with Dickens last year, but haven't yet finished those, so that they will have to count in due course as my first book read of 2019. Another seven films of 2018 yet await...