In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

I don't think I'm going to manage to complete another book before the end of 2023 now, so it seems like time to post this list of what I read this year, with brief notes on each. I don't have pictures of all of them, because I've already returned one borrowed book to its owner and read another on Kindle, but these are the ones I do have:



( List and notes under here )

On Thursday, I had the pleasure of delivering the second Goth City World Dracula Day lecture at the Midland Hotel in Bradford, and thus helping to cement it as an annual institution. I went to the first one last year (LJ / DW), and had already booked a ticket for this year when I got a message from the organiser asking if I would deliver it this time. I hadn't quite expected that, but I am generally up for any opportunity to talk about Dracula-related things in a public forum, so I agreed.

Various ideas for the topic sprang to mind, but after a chat through the options with lady_lugosi1313 in her garden I decided to run with one which really leaned into the theme of anniversaries. The main one was the 125th anniversary of Dracula's publication, but as it happens this year is also the centenary of Nosferatu, 50 years since the release of Dracula AD 1972 and 25 years since the launch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I managed to fill the rather awkward 75-year anniversary gap with a 1947 revival of the Dracula stage play, and thus a journey through time working in 25-year slices was born.

The audience was small, but they seemed to enjoy themselves, and it was certainly fun getting gothed up celebrating Dracula's 125th anniversary. I can say I played my part in a worldwide event which included Dacre Stoker doing a tour of the UK and a world-record-breaking gathering of people dressed up as vampires in Whitby. Here are ( a few pictures of the event )
As if that weren't enough, thanks to the wonders of modern technology I also managed to be part of another World Dracula Day initiative on the same day. This was the first of a series of videos to mark the anniversary made by Erin Chapman, whom I met at the World Dracula Congress in Dublin in 2016 (LJ / DW), for the YouTube channel Morbid Planet. She had contacted a bunch of Dracula scholars and commentators, for some reason including me(!) around February, asking us to record little pieces to camera answering three questions she had set us. So we all sent our footage in, and she has now compiled it into three videos, the first of which was released this Thursday and the other two of which will follow. If you'd like to know what I, Dacre Stoker, Christopher Frayling and a bunch of others would ask Bram Stoker if we could sit down for a coffee with him, the answers are here:

Watch on YouTube

In September 2021, Talking Pictures TV launched the Cellar Club, a Friday-night horror / SF triple-bill introduced and hosted by Caroline Munro. Usually they start with a good solid classic, followed up by two more films which are - shall we say? - usually more deservedly obscure. For the first three weeks, the top-billed movies were Hammer's Golden Trinity: The Mummy, Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein (working through them in backwards chronological order of production for some reason). Combined with Caroline Munro hosting them, of course I was going to make the effort to watch those live. And, as I could see that lots of my friends were also talking about them excitedly on Twitter, somehow it felt right to live-tweet them during broadcast.

I don't usually live-tweet films. It's not really a great way to watch a film you haven't seen before, because half the time your eyes are on your device rather than the TV, so you miss visual details and quite often plot points too as you write about the last thing which happened. But I gradually realised there was a whole community of people watching and live-tweeting the top-billed Cellar Club film each week, led by the TheFilmCrowd account. Soon I was not just tweeting my own thoughts into the void, but engaging with other people's and getting feedback on mine. So, although it's still not how I would watch a film I really wanted to engage with deeply, I've come to consider it a different but fun way of watching in its own right. I've also made a bunch of new Twitter friends that way and really enjoyed interacting with them, including between the live-tweets.

The whole thing has posed a problem for the way I record my film viewing in this journal, though. I've been writing at least something here for every film I've watched since 2007. It's a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it absolutely definitely means I don't watch as many films as I might if I didn't do it, because the 'cost' of watching any film is that I have to write an LJ / DW post about it. Although I tried to set a rule at the beginning that they didn't have to be extensive reviews, and just a record and quick reaction would be fine, that simply isn't what I'm like. I always have a lot of thoughts I want to record, which in turn becomes a burden. On the other hand, though, the knowledge that I'll need to write something down after watching has definitely made me more attentive to what I see, and the regular practice of articulating my thoughts has probably made me a better film critic. I'm pretty sure it's the reason why my Cellar Club live-tweets ended up getting me invited onto a live webcast to discuss Hammer films on Sunday.

But I've been struggling with what to do about the fact that I've been gaily watching all these films, and without yet 'writing up' a single one here. Initially I told myself these views 'didn't count', because I wasn't watching 'properly' (due to looking at my device half the time), and at least initially had seen the films before so had written up 'proper' reviews here on earlier occasions anyway. But increasingly as the Cellar Club moved onto films I hadn't seen before, including some I'd been meaning to watch for a while, that position has become unsatisfactory. And in any case, the very nature of the whole thing means that I do have a written record of each film anyway. That's what the live-tweets are! They just aren't here.

So, all this is by way of saying that I'm now going to perform the rather tedious (probably for both me and my subscribers) task of importing the content of these threads here, so that I can integrate them into the record of my other LJ / DW write-ups. Thankfully, every live-tweet is neatly threaded - something I did in the first place mainly to avoid swamping followers who weren't interested with a barrage of tweets about a movie they weren't watching. So my plan in each case is to link directly to the first tweet in the thread, which will mean I can see them again easily in their original context in future. But I'm also (this is the most tedious bit for me) going to copy and paste the content of each individual thread into the body of an LJ / DW entry, so that I don't have to go to Twitter for the details, and indeed I have an independent record in case some day Twitter ceases to exist. (More likely for LJ at the moment, but that's why I also use DW.)

Some of the individual tweets won't make sense any more out of context, even to me, but that's the nature of the thing. I reserve the right to quietly correct typos, break hashtags which I don't want LJ to replicate or insert editorial comments where I can remember the context and want to clarify it, and indeed to include a paragraph of prelude or commentary where I want to say a bit more here than was included in the original thread. It'll take a few entries over a few weeks, so sorry for the spamminess while that's happening. Each thread will always be under a cut anyway, so hopefully not too annoying. And then once I've brought things up to date, I can just keep up the habit on a weekly-or-less-frequent basis, and I'll be back to business as usual but with a better record of my film viewing. Phew!

( 12. The Mummy (1959), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 3 September )

( 13. Dracula (1958), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 10 September )

( 14. The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), dir. Terence Fisher, broadcast 17 September )

OK, that wasn't too bad actually. I think I can catch up in this way reasonably quickly. Probably not this week, as I'm going to Oxford on Thursday and need to pack for that tomorrow evening. But judging by this first experiment, it seems feasible and a reasonable compromise for the sake of my record-keeping. Cool.

I've got so behind with book reviews that I'm here reviewing a book I read in July last year. It's partly because of an intensive autumn / winter (teaching) and then spring (LibDemmery), but it's also because I got a bit stuck on this particular review, wanting to articulate complex things about the presentation of narrative raised by the stories but just always being too tired every time I opened the file. I still don't think I've done it particularly crisply, but I'll settle for getting at least something posted at this stage.


The book in question is a rather random collection of J. Sheridan Le Fanu stories published to tie in with the release of Hammer's The Vampire Lovers in 1970. I bought it probably some time between the ages of about 10 and 14, when I used to comb through baskets of books labelled '10p each' on the floor in charity shops and a farm shop which my Mum often took us to, pulling out anything which looked Gothic horror-related. I recognised Peter Cushing on the cover of this one and knew it should be promising, though I hadn't seen The Vampire Lovers at the time. I remember reading Carmilla back then, and I suppose I read the rest of the stories too, but having forgotten all about them it seemed like time for a re-read. That said, I actually skipped Carmilla itself this time, as I read it on its own relatively recently after going to a theatrical production of it (LJ / DW). So I focused primarily on the other stories this time.

It got me thinking about ( how stories of the supernatural are framed )

This is a terrible-brilliant book about Vlad as Dracula, and the first of a trilogy. It's one of many written following the publication of Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally (1972), In Search of Dracula, which took their (rather over-egged) argument that Stoker's Dracula was based on a profound and detailed knowledge of the life of the historical Vlad Dracula, and spun glorious fiction out of it. Florescu and McNally misunderstood how Stoker (and indeed fiction generally) worked and their case has now been comprehensively deconstructed, but the opposite extreme of arguing that Stoker's Dracula has nothing whatsoever to do with the historial Voievod is also just as wrong, and in any case I don't really care and still love the connection. It is my personal head-canon. So books which adhere to it are my happy place.

This one presents itself in grand Gothic tradition, just like Dracula, as an authentic 'found' document - specifically the memoir of Mircea, son of Vlad Dracula, written in 1480, discovered by Abraham Van Helsing in a Russian monastery in 1898, translated and annotated by him, and then 'found' again by Peter Tremayne in an Islington street market. The story starts in Rome, where Mircea, twenty-two years old, has recently been orphaned following the death of his mother, Dracula's second wife, who had fled there for safety in 1462 when Dracula discovered she was having an affair. He is well-to-do but gets himself into trouble after seducing the wife of a local prince, and decides that the time is right to take up an invitation from his older half-brothers, Vlad and Mihail, to return to Wallachia and claim his share of their birthright now that Dracula is dead. Naturally, when he gets there, he finds them living in a remote and spooky castle, appearing only at night and plotting to turn him into a vampire so he can help them restore the house of Dracula to its rightful mastery over the world. Meanwhile, Dracula himself is not as dead as people have been led to believe...

'Peter Tremayne' is apparently a pseudonym for Peter Berresford Ellis, who is also a Celtic historian and now best-known for the Sister Fildelma murder mystery series. I actually think it's fair enough for a non-specialist historian not to have debunked Florescu and McNally's theories about Dracula for himself, especially since the main grounds for questioning their claims came from the study of Stoker's notes in the 1980s. Meanwhile, his historical grounding is clear throughout, and he has certainly absorbed what was known about the historical Vlad in the the late '70s pretty thoroughly and gives room in the novel to different perspectives on him. Mircea begins the story believing that his father was a popular ruler who had been just to punish the Saxons for trying to overthrow him, but as he meets Saxons on his journey through Wallachia who don't know he is Vlad's son, he discovers that to them he was a bloodthirsty tyrant. Later, in Tirgoviste, he meets an abbot in whose view Vlad was driven by an excessive puritanical austerity which led him to punish the immoral, but also wonders whether the horrific stories about him can really be true, or invented by his enemies to discredit him. Others note that VLad may have been harsh and ruthless, but at least he drove the Turks out, while Mircea himself knows of plenty of other contemporary rulers who impale at least as much of Dracula - including John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester (aka the Butcher of England).

That said, some bits of Tremayne's background research felt like they had been crow-barred in for the sake of it. On the way to Wallachia, Mircea travels through Dubrovnik, but no action takes place there. Rather, it is mentioned, we are treated to a paragraph about its history, economy and demography which reads for all the world as though it had been copied out of an encyclopedia, and then we just go straight into "When I left Dubrovnik, I noticed almost immediately a drop in temperature." So... why bother with a copy-and-paste description of what was actually nothing more than a staging-post on his journey? Meanwhile, there are plenty more nods to Stoker's novel beyond the simple presentation of the story as a first-person documentary account. E.g. Mircea sees blue flames flickering in the darkness as he approaches Castle Dracula, which his coach driver stops and bends over to do something. Later, he learns that one of the ways Dracula may have become a vampire is by dabbling in sorcery and conjuring the devil, while in the final moments of the novel Dracula tells Mircea he has not won because he will spread his revenge over centuries and has only just begun.

( The castle )

( Brother John )

( Dracula and his origins )

After all this, the actual ending felt slightly disappointing. Mircea fights off most of the vampires with a sword blessed by the Pope, through which he feels some kind of magic power surging as he lifts it against them. That felt like a bit too much of an easy solution, I think - as when a Doctor Who story is essentially solved by waving the sonic screwdriver. During the sword-fight, a candelabra is knocked over into a tapestry, setting the castle ablaze, and Dracula himself is lost somewhere in the flames - which of course creates plenty of opportunities for him to escape and go on to further adventures. As Van Helsing spells out in a final note appended to the manuscript, that includes those recorded by Stoker.

If there's another book out there which combines Stoker's Dracula, the historical Dracula and Hammerish notions of vampirism as rooted in ancient paganism, I'd sure as hell love to read it. Until then, this one will enjoy a special place in my heart, despite its occasional ineptitudes and rather weak ending. I remain unclear as to why it is titled 'Dracula Unborn', as I couldn't see that that title matched up with any of its characters.

I have been wanting to explore more of Bram Stoker's fiction in order to get a sense of the wider context for Dracula, and chose this book to start with because it is set in Cruden Bay, where I went with the Dracula Society in Bram's footsteps in summer 2018 (LJ / DW). While we were there, local Stoker researcher Mike Shepherd showed us the places where he had stayed or which had inspired his fiction, with The Mystery of the Sea featuring fairly heavily because of its local setting. I read Mike's book, When Brave Men Shudder: the Scottish origins of Dracula about six months later (LJ / DW), which revealed that for Mike, The Mystery of the Sea was important not only for its engagement with the Cruden Bay region, but also for its insights into Stoker's spiritual outlook. So that intensified my desire to read it, and here we are.

( Similarities to and differences from Dracula )

( Authorial self-insertion )

( Bram's spirituality )

( Gender roles )

( Blatant racism )

Hahhh, yeah... I was up for a modern setting. It's worth remembering that Stoker's novel departed from the early Gothic tradition in using what for him was a modern setting complete with all the latest technology (wax cylinders, telegrams, Kodaks, etc). And of course my love for Dracula: AD 1972 knows no bounds ( and causes spoilers )

In the end, seen in toto, I think this is where this version of Dracula sits for me:
1. The whole Hammer opus (including The Unquenchable Thirst of Dracula)
2. Stoker's original novel
3. The Northern Ballet version
4. The Mystery and Imagination version
5. This version

And you know, that's not bad going given how many versions there are. Not bad going at all.

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 one I think I spotted on Amazon and put on my wish-list for kind family members to buy as a Christmas present. It sets out to answer puzzles and questions raised by Stoker's novel, with the one that really caught me eye being the theory that Quincey Morris is actually a vampire in league with Dracula, based mainly on the fact that he allows Dracula to escape at a couple of crucial points in the action. But on reading I discovered that this theory isn't original to Sutherland - rather, he's picked it up (as he quite freely acknowledges), from another source: Franco Moretti 1983, Signs Taken for Wonders. Much the same was true for most of the book, with many of the sources being blog posts (including several I had already read), while a certain sloppiness of detail betrayed a superficial grasp of the material on the author's own part (e.g. anyone who has a passing familiarity with Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films would know instantly that The Tomb of Ligeia could not have been released in 1982, as he has it).

So, while I appreciate the proper and careful referencing, this is basically a work of synthesis rather than that of a single sharp mind picking carefully over the novel's loose threads. Also, there was no acknowledgement at all of what to me is a crucial difference - that between explanations based on what is there in the text (such as the theory that Quincey may be a vampire), and explanations based on what we know about Stoker and his authorial process (e.g. Why does Van Helsing swear in German? Because Stoker originally conceived of the character as German but later changed him to Dutch, probably based on a combination of characters from Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly). I'm down for both, but they're not the same and I have already read bucket-loads of serious-business books offering the latter. I wanted the fannish story-expanding of the former.

Still, it was a fun book to read, and did include some really interesting insights. I've long been intrigued myself by the following claim of Dracula's, reported by Jonathan Harker in his diary of 8th May:

"Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?" He held up his arms.

There are three things a vampire could mean when he says something like that:

1. The conventional human meaning - I am directly descended from Attila.
2. I myself am Attila
3. I bit Attila and drank his blood during his lifetime

Either of the latter two would have to mean he was far older than Vlad III Dracula, but oddly that possibility seems to have been almost entirely ignored by Dracula commentators. (Not that they are mutually exclusive - an immortal vampire able to walk around in daylight can be multiple different historical figures across the generations.) Sutherland has picked it up, though - and as far as I can tell in this instance on his own initiative. In fact, it's his answer to the titular question of the book - Who is Dracula's Father? He ends up suggesting that Dracula may be a child conceived on the night of Attila's death, which was also his wedding-night to a new wife, which to me is slightly weaker than "I am Attila" or "I bit Attila", but still at least gets something out of the line. Props for that.

Another interesting observation is that

When blood is spilled on the floor, from Seward's arm which Renfield has cut in a maniac moment, he laps it up. Thereafter he seems to know everything that Seward knows. He owns him.

That is, Renfield is able to secure a similar telepathic connection between himself and Seward after drinking his blood to the one which Dracula has with Mina in the same circumstances, even though he isn't a vampire. I'd have to read the relevant parts of the novel again to know if the text really bears out what Sutherland says, but if it does, it sort of suggests something interesting about how Stoker is trying to portray vampirism - that the magical properties of blood-drinking aren't rooted in the condition of vampirism (and thus restricted to the vampire characters), but are to some extent inherent in the blood itself - the blood is the life. What distinguishes vampires from humans then isn't so much a quasi-medical condition of the body, but rather that they have recognised and given themselves over to this knowledge and the power that it brings, which is entirely consistent with what Stoker says about Dracula learning his secrets from the Devil in the Scholomance.

Finally - and I can't believe I didn't notice this one before - Harker leaves Bistritz for Dracula's castle on the eve of St George's Day, which his landlady explains means that at midnight "all the evil things in the world will have full sway". But as Sutherland also points out, Dracula's name means 'son of the Dragon' (as Stoker knew), and St George is famous above all as a dragon-slayer - which is what Jonathan, an Englishman and thus a knight of St George (at one point in the novel, Van Helsing literally calls them 'knights of the Cross') will do at the climax. It's another of Bram's Good vs. Evil dichotomies, as well as an index of Jonathan's character development - from the innocent traveller, out of his depth and at the mercy of supernatural things at the beginning, to the swooping hero, defeating them at the end. Nice.

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.