In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

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...

This novel was written by two sisters, of whom the elder, Emily Gerard, was a Polish cavalry officer's wife and spent time living in the Transylvanian Romanian towns of Sibiu and Brașov where he was stationed. It's well known in Dracula circles that she used that time to research an article and book on Transylvania which were used in turn by Bram Stoker in the course of his research for Dracula:

• 1885: 'Transylvanian Superstitions' in The Nineteenth Century 8: p. 128-144.
• 1888: The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania, New York: Harper.

But her experiences also clearly informed this novel, which itself also relates closely to Dracula. The connection is flagged up explicitly in the one and only newspaper interview which Bram ever gave about his best-selling novel, conducted by one Jane Stoddard, which begins like this:

One of the most interesting and exciting of recent novels is Mr. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” It deals with the ancient mediaeval vampire legend, and in no English work of fiction has this legend been so brilliantly treated. The scene is laid partly in Transylvania and partly in England. The first fifty-four pages, which give the journal of Jonathan Harker after leaving Vienna until he makes up his mind to escape from Castle Dracula, are in their weird power altogether unrivalled in recent fiction. The only book which to my knowledge at all compares with them is “The Waters of Hercules,” by E.D. Gerard, which also treats of a wild and little known portion of Eastern Europe. Without revealing the plot of the story, I may say that Jonathan Harker, whose diary first introduces the vampire Count, is a young solicitor sent by his employer to Castle Dracula to arrange for the purchase of a house and estate in England.

It's important to notice here that Stoddard isn't saying that Bram's novel wholly resembles the Gerards' - only that theirs is the only other novel she can think of which, like the first 54 pages of his, is set in Eastern Europe. But, recognising the surname from the publications on Transylvania, that was enough to make me look out the novel, and see just what Stoddard meant about its resemblance to the opening chapters of Dracula. None of the libraries I have easy access to had a print copy, and it seems long ago to have gone out of print so that there wasn't a cheap second-hand paperback or Kindle copy available either, but it is on the Internet Archive, and after a bit of experimentation I discovered that downloading the pdf version to my tablet resulted in a readable text which I could take to bed with me. So away I went.

It's a Victorian novel written by women for women, so it isn't a great surprise that the main subject-matter of the book is the question of who our main character, Gretchen, will marry. There are multiple contenders in the field - the sensible, middle-aged, middle-income lawyer Dr. Komers, the wealthy, aristocratic and childishly selfish Baron Tolnay, and (very much lagging behind the field and utterly repulsive to Gretchen) the obsessive Dr. Kokovics. A lot of time is spent establishing their (and multiple other) characters, at first in Gretchen's German home-town and then in the valley of the Waters of Hercules, to which the action shifts from the 7th of the novel's 53 chapters. Gretchen herself is bright, perceptive, and (as we are repeatedly told) sensible, but she begins the novel rather obsessed with the idea of marrying into wealth. Needless to say, she will learn over the course of it that there are other things more important, and that the lawyer has hidden depths which weren't initially apparent on his sensible-to-the-point-of-dullness surface. The style was pleasantly easy to read. The Gerards like to play with our expectations, setting up a scene from one point of view and then switching to another which reveals something different. They are good at establishing settings and moods, and occasionally quite happy to devote a whole chapter to what might seem like a mere comic distraction (such as the various fishing methods espoused by different visitors to the Hercules Valley), but which of course reveals a great deal about character in the process.

The titular and main setting for the story is a very real valley and spa town in what is now part of western Romania, but belonged to Hungary at the time when the novel is set. It contains healing baths and a statue of Hercules, who is supposed to have stopped in the valley to bathe and rest. But much of the action and drama of the novel is in fact driven by another (as far as I can tell) fictional location in the mountains somewhere above the valley: Gaura Dracului, a yawning and apparently bottomless chasm with many a legend attached to it, which wanderers through the forest come upon almost before they have realised it is there, and sometimes stumble and fall into as a result. Obviously, the name of this geological feature is yet another of the likely pointers which nudged Bram Stoker towards settling on the name 'Dracula' for his aristocratic vampire, and indeed it may also lie somewhere behind references to 'deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither' of which Van Helsing speaks in Dracula's Transylvania. In this novel, the name of the chasm has nothing to do with the Dracula family, and simply means ‘The Devil’s Hole’ - actually a very common name for deep caves and pools all over the world (see here for just a few largely English-language versions). But that is quite enough to underpin a number of Gothic horror tropes which run throughout the novel alongside its main romance story.

As the action shifts into the Hercules Valley, the Gerards work hard to establish the right kind of atmosphere of lingering paganism and local superstition for the legends of Gaura Dracului to work on their characters and within their plot - just, of course, as Stoker does on Jonathan Harker's journey into Transylvania. Indeed, Gretchen and her family's journey to the valley adheres to the same basic Gothic model of the journey into a strange and dangerous land as Harker's. Once they get to the valley, we hear a lot about how paganism has survived there, overseen by the statue of Hercules whom the locals treat as though he were still a literal god, and we are treated to some ripe stereotypes of the superstitious Romanian peasant that will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has read Dracula. Indeed, when Gretchen asks some local goatherds where she can find Gaura Dracului, they react with terror and cross themselves. Gradually, we learn that the god of the valley has sworn that the hole must have human blood once a century, which to me rang bells of Polidori's The Vampyre, in which Lord Ruthven must have it once a year. Indeed, a prologue set in the time of Trajan establishes that this has been happening since the Roman period. That was particularly interesting to me in light of the paper I gave on Dracula and Classical antiquity at the Brașov conference, because it means the Gerards were here doing one of the very same things I had argued Stoker was doing in Dracula - rooting his menace in the ancient, pagan past as a way of emphasising how long and deeply-established it is, and of capitalising on the blurry line between pagan gods and demons in the western Christian tradition. Meanwhile, we also hear that Gaura Dracului contains secret hidden hoards of Turkish, Russian and many other coins, just like the dusty corners of Dracula's castle, and all sorts of Gothic vocabulary is used to describe it. It is an open grave, haunted and full of ghosts; it has fanged jaws like a monster; Gretchen feels when lost in the forest around it as though the bats and moths flitting about her are phantoms; and a climactic fire-storm which rages through that same forest in the final chapters of the book contains descriptions of trees writhing in agony and an army of fire-demons rampaging through them.

So, yes, it definitely has more than a touch of the Gothic to it, and does resemble Dracula in more than the purely geographical matter of being set in Eastern Europe. I don't think we have any proof that Stoker read it, while since we do have proof that he read the article and book on Transylvania by Emily Gerard which I've mentioned above, it's quite possible that a lot of what appear to be connections between this novel and Dracula were actually ideas he took from those. But, having read it, I could definitely believe that he had done so too. I think one of my little projects for the next year might be to read up a bit more on the Gerards, including reading Emily's work on Transylvania and learning a bit more about their biography, so that I can understand their influence on Dracula more fully. It might well make a decent paper for another Dracula conference at some stage.

Meanwhile, there were other themes in the novel I found interesting in their own right, regardless of any connection to Dracula. One, inevitably, was its assumptions about and attitudes to gender. It's no surprise that Gretchen's main concern is marriage, or that this is couched primarily in terms of how she can best marry her way to a comfortable lifestyle, but I found it interesting that one of the plans she hatches over the course of the novel is to find the treasures supposedly hidden in Gaura Dracului, on the grounds that if she finds her own fortune she can marry whoever she likes. This is hardly a feminist parable, of course, since she still clearly doesn't have the option to lead a genuinely self-sufficient working life, but the very idea is still one of the ways in which Gretchen is cast as a radical, modern thinker, and she feels she needs to hide it like a guilty secret from her more traditionally-feminine Italian friend, Belita. I was also struck by two separate scenes in which Gretchen is cornered very horribly by entitled suitors, and which read very much like the sort of horror stories women have to relate all too often on Facebook and Twitter about their experiences with creepy men today. In one, she is trapped in a gorge with a sheer drop at the end of it by Dr. Kokovics as dusk is falling, and her terror as he approaches, coupled with his dismissal of her terror, together made it very clear (without ever spelling it out) that her basic fear was of being sexually assaulted. In the other, Baron Tolnay gets her alone in dark forest, demands her love on the basis that he has proved his to her by committing a terrible crime, and tells her that him doing so was all her fault for leading him on - which she internalises and believes. Between the two they very much demonstrated how much the novel acted in the Victorian period as a forum for women to share such experiences under the cloak of fiction.

Also striking was the carefully-ranked hierarchy of national stereotypes into which all of the characters are slotted, and which belong very much to the fundamentally racist thinking of the day. Strong east-west and north-south fault-lines are in evidence, so that the Romanians are swarthy, Oriental, lazy, stupid, natural liars and superstitious, the Hungarians are more competent but ultimately not to be trusted, and the Germans (our point-of-view characters) are blond, noble, intelligent and morally sound. Gretchen's Italian friend is warm and effusive but thinks of little other than fashion and status; the novel's one English character, Mr. Howard, is reserved and hidebound by social etiquette, but does warm up and come round to Gretchen and her family over the course of the story; and a reference to hook-nosed Jews pops up in the context of a discussion about debts. All of this, too, can be found in Stoker's Dracula, of course, though there's no need to believe he got it from here. It is the widely-accepted thinking of the day, occurring unsurprisingly in both novels. That's Victorian literature for you. If you can read round it, though, and like the sound of pagan superstitions, yawning chasms and a German girl's marriage prospects, I would on the whole very much recommend this one.

Back in April I got a request via a friend who works in the British Library to translate a few words and sentences into Latin for Ben Aaronovitch's latest Rivers of London book (LJ / DW). I knew squat all about the series then, but agreed to the assignment and, with help from a couple of colleagues, supplied the requisite text. A few weeks later, a signed copy of the first novel in the series arrived with thanks from Ben's agent, and now I have read it.


It's very good, as I know many friends who have been reading them for years are already well aware. The basic premise of the universe is that magic is real, and in Britain was codified and systematised by Isaac Newton in the 1770s. In the present day, a magical institution resides in a building called The Folly on Russell Square, and although it has no official standing or even openly acknowledged existence, in practice the Metropolitan Police work with its enigmatic Master, Thomas Nightingale, on cases involving supernatural beings. We, the readers, are introduced to all of this through the eyes of Peter Grant, the book's main character, a trainee police officer who meets a ghost one night and shortly thereafter finds himself signed up as Nightingale's apprentice. He spends the rest of the novel painstakingly learning basic magic while trying to solve a bizarre string of paranormal murders and intercede between the two major gods (each with a coterie of secondary water-spirits) whom he learns have charge of the Thames - Old Father Thames for the upper, rural stretches and Mama Thames for the lower, urban-coastal ones.

I could probably have taken or left the actual plot, which turned out to be about a sort of revenant possessing people and making them commit violent acts. For all that this was packaged up as a murderous retelling of the story of Punch and Judy, it could have been any old Big Bad really, and it was probably a mistake to take on this, the feud between the river gods and the initial world-building of an opening novel in one go. If the feud between the river gods had somehow underpinned the revenant plot, causing the problem through the disharmony between them, it might have worked better, but I don't think that was the case - although I may have missed something to that effect, as it all got quite complicated and surreal towards the end.

The world-building was good, though, belonging squarely to my favourite genre of fantasy - that is, where magic and the supernatural are real, but still directly connected to the world we actually live in. And of course Ben Aaronovitch being who he is - i.e. a British cult / SF writer whose CV includes Doctor Who - there were plenty of references neatly calculated to make a reader like me go 'squee!'. I believe my favourite was the following, coming as Peter Grant first encounters The Folly:

Russell Square lies a kilometre north of Covent Garden on the other side of the British Museum. According to Nightingale, it was at the heart of a literary and philosophical movement in the early years of the last century, but I remember it because of an old horror movie about cannibals living in the Underground system.

Yes, yes, Bloomsbury Group etc., but more importantly, Death Line! He's talking about Death Line, which is one of my absolute favourite horror films in the history of ever (LJ / DW). There are references to midichlorians and John Polidori, too, but that was the one I enjoyed most.

Peter himself is mixed race, which created some useful space to show up some of the on-going structural flaws with the police. There's one direct reference to the Macpherson report, reminding us that the Met has only fairly recently become an environment Peter can comfortably work in, and in the present day of the novel (its 2011 publication date) he still needs to navigate various micro-aggressions. In much the same way that the characters in Being Human were all very real as well as supernatural Others (the vampire was Irish, the werewolf Jewish and the ghost mixed race), it also reflects his liminal position with one foot each in the ordinary human world and the magical underworld, as well as putting him in the perfect position to mediate credibly between Old Father Thames (who is white) and Mama Thames (who is black).

As a female reader, though, it did irritate me that Peter seemed barely able to look at half of the female characters in the book without appraising them sexually. I mean, maybe that's just an inevitable part of a young male character's internal viewpoint, and it doesn't necessarily mean he can't respect their intelligence or professionalism as well, but it was just so relentless and indiscriminate that it got kind of tedious. I don't really want to have to sit on a character's shoulder watching them objectify every woman they come across - and especially not when that included Mama Thames, a literal goddess. Again, I get that you might want to convey the experience of a goddess' immense power partly in terms of sexual allure, but what we get is Peter narrating how much he wants to put his face between her breasts and gets so hard he finds it difficult to sit down by the time she offers him a chair. Even within the book, she and her coterie laugh at him for the inappropriateness of this, but I'd have preferred not to go there in the first place.

In the end, my own favourite character was Molly, a being of indeterminate nature (when Peter asks Nightingale what she is, he just replies "Indispensable") who lives in the Folly and appears to be its entire domestic staff. She never speaks, Peter catches her at one point eating dripping chunks of raw meat in the middle of the night, and she has a brilliant scene at the end where she comes over for all the world like Sadako out of Ringu and bites him in the neck as a way of sending him backwards through time so that he can defeat the troublesome revenant. But she is a model of efficiency around the Folly, and clearly fiercely loyal to Nightingale and his endeavours.

I will probably read some more of these books in due course, and rather wish I'd done so before I attempted to translate the Latin I was given in the first place. I certainly understand much better now some of the things which puzzled me as I struggled with the initial text, such as why Father Thames seemed also to be called Tiberius Claudius Verica. I'd like to know more about his back-story, as well as Molly's. That said, I've got two entire bookshelves' worth of unread books in my house at the moment, none of which are Rivers of London books, and at my current average rate of no more than ten leisure books per year, it's going to take me a while to get through all those. :-( So it may be some time before I'm back in this particular world.

This book presents a transcript of and commentary on a journal kept by Bram Stoker between 1871 and 1882, which was left by his wife Florence to their son Noel, and passed down from him to Noel Dobbs, Bram's great-grandson, who lives today on the Isle of Wight. It was clearly more of a commonplace book or writer's notebook than a personal diary of the kind Stoker's characters write in Dracula, and contains 310 entries consisting of ideas he's had, bits of poetry, scenes he's observed in daily life, stories and jokes people have told him etc. Indeed, it's not unlike the sort of stuff people put on social media these days, with one entry in particular which records his inner turmoil after a child has called him ugly striking me as particularly classic LJ / DW fare! Most date from his mid-twenties to early thirties when he was living in Dublin, working for the civil service and writing theatre reviews in the evenings, although a few reflect his transition to London to work for Henry Irving, which happened in 1878.

The editors, Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller and Bram's great-great-nephew Dacre (whom I went to hear speak last November: LJ / DW), present the entries thematically, under headings such as 'Humour', 'Personal and Domestic', 'The Streets of Dublin', 'Theatre', etc., rather than in the order presented in the original book, which I wasn't sure about at first. But I realised as I read that since this isn't a diary, the entries don't build on each other in any meaningful way, many of them aren't dated and indeed several seem to have been copied into the book from other sources (presumably scraps of paper) some time after they were written, there was no very compelling reason to present them in their original order. Meanwhile, grouping them thematically (but in their original order within that theme) does create some sense of how Bram's life and thinking evolved over time in different areas, and perhaps more importantly allows scope for an editorial introduction to each section contextualising and commenting on the notes. These are substantial (ten or more pages each for nine different sections, as well as an overall introduction and coda), so that they add up to what is almost a biography of Bram during his Dublin years, and indeed supply a lot of the sort of detail which I wanted and was disappointed not to get from David Skal's biography when I read it recently (LJ / DW). As such, I learnt plenty from them and enjoyed doing so.

Bram's actual journal entries are certainly fascinating if you're interested in the evolving thought-processes of the man who would go on to write Dracula. There is a (shortish) section entitled 'En Route to Dracula' which documents the emergence of his Gothic sensibilities, such as a memo to himself to do a dramatic adaptation of Poe's 'Fall of the House of Usher' or a couple of jottings for story ideas which relate to motifs later used in Dracula. But they are interesting for general social history too, as a record of the life and thoughts of a middle-class Victorian Dubliner. We learn quite a lot about his social life, work life and the general comings-and-goings of contemporary Dublin, which of course include quite a lot of obvious deprivation and inequality. Indeed, precisely because he was an aspiring writer, honing his skills as an observer of human life and capturing scenes and interactions which he found in some way striking or poignant, he is probably a better-than-average witness to his surroundings. I will confess that I only skim-read most of his sentimental and generally-mediocre poetry, and didn't always find the jokes and anecdotes he wrote down particularly funny, but in general I found him genial company, and am glad to have absorbed a slightly more rounded picture of him - not to mention a couple of little insights into his knowledge of the ancient world which will be useful for my Classical references in Dracula paper.

This is short story collection subtitled 'A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories' which I bagged for a bargain price at the Dracula Society auction in Whitby last autumn (LJ / DW). It basically aims to trace the evolution of vampire mythology, mainly in fiction but also in accounts of real folk beliefs, up to the point when Dracula was written and a little way beyond. That made it a very useful research resource for the paper I am writing about Classical references in Dracula, as it would allow me to get a sense of the extent to which they were a standard characteristic of the genre before Bram wrote. I already knew that much of both Polidori's 'The Vampyre' and Byron's fragment (here called 'The End of my Journey') take place amongst Grecian ruins, for example, but wanted to see whether the same equation persisted beyond high Romantic literature. Obviously I would not dream of assuming that Bram read every story in this book, but for some stories it's clear from tropes which he absorbed and replicated that he did, so anything Classical sitting alongside them is of particular interest.

The full table of contents ( reads thus )

I'm not going to review every single one, so anything which I haven't commented on specifically below can be assumed to be a very enjoyable story to read. But these were my thoughts on a few which particularly struck me - for good or ill:

'The Deathly Lover' - this was originally published in French in 1843 under the title 'La morte amoureuse', and is often also known as 'Clarimonde' after the vampire main character. It is actually set in Italy and told from the perspective of a priest, who falls under the spell of Clarimonda (as her name is spelt in the English translation I read) and begins leading a strange double life, where he is a priest living in a simple hut by day and her lover living in the lap of luxury by night, to the point where he no longer fully knows which is his real life and which a dream. We don't know for sure that Stoker read it, but a scene in which the priest cuts his finger while paring some fruit, and Clarimonde leaps out of bed to suck at the blood certainly resembles the scene in which Dracula does much the same after Harker cuts himself shaving. In another passage, she is also compared in short succession to both Cleopatra and Beelzebub, which is likewise very similar to the ways in which Bram associates Dracula both with Classical antiquity and the Devil, and is exactly the sort of stuff my paper will be about.

'Varney the Vampyre' - one of several entries in the book which is actually an extract from a much longer text, rather than a complete short story. The original is in fact c. 667,000 words long! Like most people who are into vampire fiction no doubt, I have occasionally harboured ambitions to read the whole thing, perhaps even as part of an online reading group with other people at an instalment a week. But this extract, which was simply the opening instalment of the story, reminded me that although it is fun in its own way and doubtless an influence on much later vampire fiction, it was very much hammered out with the aim of filling the maximum amount of magazine space for the minimum amount of intellectual effort, and thus utterly hackneyed and melodramatic. I mean, yay for that, but I have a finite lifetime so I think I will prioritise better things.

'The Mysterious Stranger' - Bram pretty clearly read this as well. It's set in the Carpathians, and involves travellers beset by wolves and a mysterious tall pale man who can command them at will. He proves to live in a semi-ruined castle, visits the main family of the story as an apparently-human guest but refuses all food and drink while their daughter grows pale and sick, and is eventually defeated using much the same sort of vampire lore as applies in Dracula. I was additionally fascinated to notice that while Bram does not seem to have made anything out of this line: "Azzo [the aristocratic vampire] stretched forth his hand, and grasping the sword in the middle, it snapped like a broken reed", Jimmy Sangster, the script-writer for Hammer's Dracula, Prince of Darkness certainly did:


(Sorry, for reasons I can't figure out, it seems to be necessary to click through to see the gif in action. It's worth it, though!)

'A Mystery of the Campagna' - this basically constituted hitting gold re Classical references, as the vampire in this story is literally a Roman woman named Vespertilia, buried by her husband in a large sarcophagus inside an ancient catacomb, who still lures, ensnares and feeds upon the inhabitants of a villa on the land above up to the story's present day (the 1880s). There is a Latin funerary inscription to translate and everything! Unfortunately there's no particular reason to believe Bram ever read it, but it certainly shows what antiquity can lend to a vampire story, building logically on Byron and Polidori's precedents and anticipating Anne Rice's Roman vampire characters by a solid century. This volume's introduction to the story annoyed me intensely by 'explaining' that the Campagna of the title "refers to a populous region in southern Italy now usually spelled Campania", though. It really isn't - the main characters are artists living in Rome, one of whom decides to rent a villa in the countryside outside the city in order to concentrate on his art, so it is very literally and specifically set in the Campagna. I'm pretty sure the internet contained enough unambiguous information about both the Campagna and Campania already in 2010 to mean that the editor of this book has no real excuse for not understanding the difference.

'Let Loose' - I hadn't read this before, but it was one of the best discoveries of the book for me, mainly because it is just really well written and conveys an atmosphere of mounting fear extremely effectively. It's about a young man who goes to draw a fresco which (for some reason) is on the wall of a rarely-visited and securely-locked church crypt, and of course hears strange noises and inadvertently frees a Something while he is down there working. It's quite Jamesian in the way it builds up the tension through small, unsettling details, but I should warn that anyone who loves dogs (and even I was charmed by the one in this story, who is called Brian) might find the end rather distressing.

'A True Story of a Vampire' - this, by contrast, was easily the most unpleasant story of the collection by dint of its skeeviness. It is sort of a take on 'Carmilla', in that it involves a vampire coming to live in the house of its victims like a cuckoo in the nest, and indeed it announces the link by naming the main female character who narrates the tale 'Carmela'. But she is not the vampire. Instead, he is an adult man and his victim is her younger brother, Gabriel, who runs about the garden in short trousers playing with birds and squirrels. Furthermore, the vampire preys on Gabriel specifically by kissing him on the lips, which seems to drain his energy in some psychic fashion. Now, obviously although Carmilla presents as a teenage girl, and thus of a similar age to her victim, she is technically centuries older, in fact of course vampires are an enormous bucketful of metaphors, and most people therefore read 'Carmilla' as a thinly-veiled story of lesbian teenage love. On the same basis, this story reads as a thinly-veiled account of predatory paedophilia. So, not good.

'The Tomb of Sarah' - this was published in December 1897, so about six months after Dracula, and is the first story in this collection to show clear signs of Stoker's influence. The vampire lore is much the same, involving for example the use of mortar infused with the host and a sacred circle, and most tellingly of all the vampire lady 'champs' her teeth exactly like every female vampire in the whole of Stoker's novel. It's fairly run-of-the-mill as an actual story, but fascinating to see Stoker's tropes (most of them of course collected in turn from elsewhere) bursting into the mythos.

I think that's it. Several of the others were very good; some I had read before but often not for a long time. Generally a very good collection, apart from the editor's inexplicable ignorance of the Campagna. Definitely more than worth the couple of quid I paid for it.

Bram Stoker worked on Dracula on and off for six years between the commitments of his job as Henry Irving's manager. During that time, the way he ensured that he did not lose track of what he was doing was to take notes falling into two main categories: his plot and character ideas, and research notes on books and places providing details and settings to flesh them out and cloak them in verism. Those notes are held now by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where they lay more-or-less untouched until the early '70s when Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu visited the library to view one of the fifteenth-century pamphlets published about Vlad the Impaler, and the archivist casually asked them if they would like to see Bram Stoker's notes for Dracula too? Since then they've been used by various scholars researching the genesis and development of the novel, and indeed parts of them have been made available as quoted extracts or transcripts within those people's publications. But this book has made them available in full to the general public for the first time.

This is obviously amazing for me, because I've long been aware of these notes and wanted to read them properly anyway, and that interest has become all the more pressing now I've decided to write a paper about Classical motifs in Dracula. Realistically, I wasn't going to travel all the way to Philadelphia just to research that - but thanks to Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, I can now do it in the comfort of my own home instead. It certainly paid off with regards to the specific topic of my paper. There is all sorts of evidence that Stoker actively set out to include antiquity within the scope of his researches – for example, he created a timeline of Transylvanian history for himself which extends from the 1st to the 19th century AD, which very much supports my core argument that this was the background and context into which he wanted to set Dracula as a character. But there are huge amounts of interest here beyond that one specific topic, ranging from watching Stoker develop and narrow down his list of key characters to scrutinising the little maps he drew to help make sure he could describe Whitby harbour accurately. You can even see how he added little notes to himself as he thought of new ideas, crossed items off as he put them into the novel itself, and had to fill in by hand gaps left in typescripts evidently done by someone else who could not always decipher his handwriting!

Indeed, that same issue clearly affects some of Eighteen-Bisang and Miller's own transcriptions of the hand-written portions of the notes. Stoker could write neatly when he wanted or needed to, but when writing notes intended for his own use, he didn't always bother. For the most part, Eighteen-Bisang and Miller clearly capture his meaning correctly, and I appreciated that they also occasionally signalled in footnotes when other authors had published different readings from theirs. But I noticed that they often ignored the symbols '+c' (for etc) and '+' (for and) in their transcriptions, while on one page they had transcribed "Roumenians take it that death is only sleep requiring cooking" for what was clearly actually "Roumenians take it that death is only sleep requiring waking" – as two seconds of thought and a bit of common sense should surely have told them. I also didn't feel their footnotes added very much to what was alresdy in the notes anyway. The majority of the footnotes just point to corresponding passages in the final novel, which I suppose saves us looking them up, but seemed a waste when they could have been used instead to provide further information about the content actually contained in the notes, similar to an annotated edition of an actual novel.

The appendices, which covered topics such as major themes in the novel as finally published, Bram's life and other publications, some of the major literary influences on his work (not reflected in any of his working notes) and what we know of the contents of his own library, were better. But even these are each individually rather short, and again mainly focused on the novel as published, rather than attempting to offer interpretations of the notes themselves. The only appendices which really relate to the actual notes are the final two, which outline the major differences between the notes and the published novel – but again, anyone who knows the novel would have seen those differences for themselves as they read the notes. The larger task of thinking about what the content of the notes really reveals in its own right – e.g. what the inclusion of particular characters, motifs or research details suggest about Stoker's initial conception of the novel and what their later rejection signals about how it evolved – hasn't really been attempted here. I guess the emphasis was always on getting the primary material of the notes themselves out, which I certainly appreciate, but it's a pity that the opportunity for an extended essay thinking seriously about them as a corpus was missed.

Edited to add: having checked my email after writing this, it turns out that while I was doing so my abstract for the 2018 Dracula Congress was accepted. So project 'Classical references in Dracula' is now definitively GO! I look forward to many happy evenings and weekends spent researching it and writing it between now and October, not to mention a trip to Romania at the end - hooray! :-)