strange_complex: (True Blood Eric wink)
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.
strange_complex: (Jessica rebel)
I saw this in late October when I went to the Whitby Goth Festival for the first time in some 17 years (yikes!). I don't think I ever wrote about that at all here on LJ / DW, but anyway it was very nice - I attended a Dracula-themed literary salon, hung out with multiple chums and of course did a bit of shopping. The festival has naturally evolved a little since Ye Olden Days, but this year also saw a particular change in that a completely different set of organisers booked the Spa for the dates of the usual Goth weekend, and put on some more recognisably Goth bands than have been booked in recent years, as well as dipping a toe in the waters of associated film screenings and related talks. Hence it was that I got to see Fright Night, along with [livejournal.com profile] big_daz, [livejournal.com profile] avaritia and her partner.

Its OTT black comedy style and special effects reminded me a bit of An American Werewolf in London, and Roddy McDowall was a great as you would expect him to be as Peter Vincent, a washed-up horror film star making a living in TV. His trajectory in the story is the same as that of the star-ship crew in Galaxy Quest - an enthusiastic fan turns to him in the belief that he's a 'real' vampire hunter, and after initially trying to protest that he is no such thing he eventually rises to the challenge. It's a motif I like, both because it's a nice meta poke at the relationship between drama and reality, but also because the way the character it's happening to both adopts the role as a kindness to another person and finds themselves living up to that person's expectations, giving a heart-warming perspective on human nature. Other than the lovely Roddy, though, the rest of the cast failed to wow me. There was a lot of very mannered acting going on, by people who don't seem to have had much of a subsequent career.

I also felt there was a distinctly homophobic undertone to the portrayal of the main vampire, played by Jerry Dandrige. He moves into the house next door to the main point-of-view character (the enthusiastic teenage fan of Roddy McDowall) with a male human companion, and they are shown at various points with their arms draped around each other, and in one scene with the human on his knees and his head in the general vicinity of the vampire's groin. (There's a nominally non-sexual explanation for this, but the director definitely intended it to look like giving head). When the vampire turns the main character's friend, 'Evil Ed' down a dark alley, he says some dialogue to him about he knows what it's like always feeling different and being an outsider, and when Ed is later staked (in wolf form), there are some very suggestive shots of his hand grabbing at the stake in his own chest. Since the vampire is (obviously) the villain, this all basically boils down to coding him as an Evil Gay, and I think two particular contemporary fears are played out through him as well: him moving in next door with his human lover makes him a Gay Neighbour, and his interaction with Ed equates to Recruiting Your Children. It's all very AIDS-hysteria, and really tainted the film for me.
strange_complex: (Dracula Scars wine)
I got back on Monday night from a long weekend in Whitby spent in the company of around 40 Dracula Society members: including [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 whom I have now dragooned into joining! I went there with a smaller group of them two years ago, and managed a decent write-up of it afterwards too (LJ / DW), but this was a more formal gathering designed to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Society's first official visit there in 1977.

[personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 and I got there shortly before lunch on the Friday, but the official business didn't begin until that evening, so we spent the afternoon enjoying Gothic seaside fun in the sunshine. We pottered around the shops buying various treasures, and then headed down to the harbour front where she introduced me to Goth Blood milkshakes - basically ordinary milkshakes with bucket-loads of food colouring in them which turn your tongue blood-red after a single sip:

2017-09-08 16.42.27.jpg

I also went through the Dracula Experience: a once-in-a-lifetime audio-visual presentation of the Dracula story. I say 'once-in-a-lifetime' because it is so rubbish that it is hard to imagine anyone voluntarily going twice (for all the reasons aptly articulated in these TripAdvisor reviews). They have a cloak at the beginning of the exhibition which they claim is one of Christopher Lee's Dracula capes, but I'm afraid it clearly isn't: it has a strong diagonal ridged texture which none of Lee's capes in any of the Hammer Dracula films ever did. Still, though, the whole thing only cost three quid, and I did chuckle most of the way through at how inept it was, so I guess it wasn't the worst thing I've ever spent money on. Afterwards, we spent one whole pound each on the tuppenny falls, where [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313, who is an experienced competitive player, completely wiped the floor with me, winning more than double the amount of tuppences I had managed to score every time we compared our takings.

The evening began with the traditional gathering around the bench which the Society donated in 1980 (I suppose we'll celebrate the 40th anniversary of that in three years too!), where [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 encountered most of the Society's members for the first time, and was also introduced to tuica: Romanian plum brandy, and of course our preferred toast. The rest of the evening was informal, but Julia (the Society's very energetic chair) had laid on a wonderful programme of events for us at the Royal Hotel the following day.

We began with a screening of 27. Holy Terrors (2017), dir. Julian Butler and Mark Goodall )

We also had two talks given by members of the Society: Gail-Nina Anderson on werewolves and Barry McCann on Jekyll and Hyde. Both traced the evolution of their creatures and their stories through time, looking at how and why they have been treated differently in different circumstances, and what aspects of the human experience they have been used to explore. And although this wasn't particularly planned, both actually informed the other very neatly, and indeed made me realise something I had never really noticed before: that Jekyll and Hyde is essentially a werewolf story. As Gail had already shown us, werewolf stories have never actually been that prescriptive about the matter of how a person becomes a werewolf: many just take it for granted that they exist, and those which do try to explain how it happens offer a much wider range of possibilities than the now common idea of being bitten by an existing werewolf. Nor is the moon particularly consistently required to prompt transformations. So a story about a man who brings out his inner beast voluntarily through a potion of his own making fits right into the canon.

After lunch (roast pork baps from the Greedy Pig GET IN MY FACE!), it was time for a quiz. Given that this consisted of a ten-point round on Stoker's Dracula (which I have read multiple times and am reading right now), a ten-point round on Whitby (where I was sat while taking the quiz), and a twenty-point round on film adaptations of Dracula (which are basically the heart of [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313's and my co-conspiratorial film watching), you would have thought I might manage to do quite well on this, but no! Somehow Julia managed to make it really hard. The winner, Kate, scored a fairly modest 26.5 points out of 40, while I scraped along with 14.5 and [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 bagged a mere 11.5. It's almost like we've been wasting our lives!

Oh well, at least we had plenty of opportunity to buy up books and DVDs which might help us to do better next time in the society auction - not to mention all sorts of other goodies, from the utterly tat-tastic to the actually very tasteful. This was my personal haul, including a notebook in the shape of Christopher Lee as Dracula )

That evening was the Society's formal dinner, so I grabbed the rare opportunity to dress up in full Gothic finery with both hands. We had allowed plenty of time to walk down from our guest-house and ended up arriving ridiculously early, so, as it was still light and I don't look like this very often, [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 indulged me with a little photo-shoot.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity )

Much wine was drunk, merriment had and patrons on a ghost walk of Whitby outside the window trolled by means of a green Frankenstein torch shone at them through a white napkin (though irritatingly they didn't seem to notice). None of this, though, stopped a hardy band of us from getting up the next morning bright and early to do the six-and-a-half-mile cliff walk from Whitby to Robin Hood's Bay. This of course was all in honour of Mina and Lucy, who do just this walk in Stoker's novel straight after the funeral of the Demeter's captain: a plan concocted by Mina with a view to tiring Lucy out and stopping her from fretting about the funeral and sleep-walking that night. She records her plan in an entry on the morning of 10 August thus:
She will be dreaming of this tonight, I am sure. The whole agglomeration of things, the ship steered into port by a dead man, his attitude, tied to the wheel with a crucifix and beads, the touching funeral, the dog, now furious and now in terror, will all afford material for her dreams. I think it will be best for her to go to bed tired out physically, so I shall take her for a long walk by the cliffs to Robin Hood's Bay and back. She ought not to have much inclination for sleep-walking then.
And you can read her post-factum report of the walk itself that evening here.

We grabbed a couple of group pictures before we set off, which I hope Michael won't mind too much that I have stolen from his FB page:

Cliff walk party selfie Michael Borio.jpg

Cliff walk photo Dutch angle Michael Borio.jpg


Then off we went, past many picturesque delights )

The conversation as we walked unfolded much as you would expect in the circumstances. I can't remember exactly who said what now, but the gist of it all went more or less like this:

"Presumably Mina and Lucy can't actually have walked to Robins Hood's Bay. They must have taken a horse and cart or something."
"Oh no, it says quite clearly in the novel that they walked."
"Yes, that's right - they're obviously going across the fields because some cows come up and give them a fright."
"Can you imagine doing this in heels and a corset, though?"
"Well, Victorian women did have sensible walking boots and country clothing."
"Yes, absolutely - the Victorians were very much into their physical exercise and fresh air."
"They would still definitely have been wearing corsets, though."
"Oh yes. Mind you, the whalebone corsets had quite a lot of give in them. You would only wear the steel ones in the evening."
"Well, my respect for Mina and Lucy is increasing with every step."
"You've got to wonder if Bram ever actually thought about the implications of doing all this in a corset, though."
"Hmm, yes - good point. Well, unless he dressed up in the full regalia himself and did the whole walk that way. You know, just to really get into the heads of his characters."
"Well, given that he was 6'4", that would have been quite a sight!"

In the end, we were not as hardcore as Mina and Lucy ourselves, though. They walked both ways, and had to suffer an unwanted visit from a curate in the evening. We got the bus back, before enjoying another final dinner together ahead of our general dispersal on the Monday morning. Not that [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 and I were in a rush to get home that morning, though - not least because she didn't have any house-keys, so couldn't get into the house until [livejournal.com profile] planet_andy got home with his set anyway, and furthermore because their boiler had broken so the house would be freezing. Instead we spent most of the day in Filey, which I have never visited before, but which proved to be a charming seaside town with a lovely museum, some great charity shops, some excellent cafes, and a fountain with a surround designed like a compass showing the directions of all the locations mentioned in the shipping forecast )

They also had a crazy golf course, where [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313 and I played a game so utterly inept that it more than once reduced us to tears of laughter; but I feel duty bound to note that she did beat me, with a score of 37 shots for 9 holes to my 40. Finally it was time to head home, playing games of "I Spy" and "I am a Hammer film: which one am I?" as we drove. All in all a very enjoyable and much-needed final summer jolly before term hits with a vengeance next week...

Feet-folks

Tuesday, 22 August 2017 10:24
strange_complex: (Dracula Risen hearse smile)
I am communing with the ur-text at the moment (i.e. reading Dracula), and was tickled to notice last night that it contains a reference to Leeds - though not a very complimentary one! It's no great surprise, of course, given that a substantial chunk of the novel is set in Whitby, and indeed it is in the mouth of old Whitby fisherman Mr Swales that the reference comes. He is complaining about people being altogether too credulous about legends of bells ringing out at sea and White Ladies and such like:
Them feet-folks from York and Leeds that be always eatin' cured herrin's and drinkin' tea an' lookin' out to buy cheap jet would creed aught. I wonder masel' who'd be bothered tellin' lies to them, even the newspapers, which is full of fool-talk.
I'm not terribly sure what 'feet' means in this context, and Google isn't helping, even when I put the phrase in quotation marks to rule out ordinary references to feet. Maybe it just means foot-passengers who have come to Whitby on the train? Or might it be Bram's attempt at spelling a local pronunciation of 'fit', and perhaps means something more like 'fine folk' (in a sort of 'fit to be Queen' kind of sense)? If any genuine Yorkshire-born chums have a clue, let me know. If it's a proper dialect word, it will have been something Bram got out of a book on Whitby dialect which we know he used in his research.

[ETA: apparently I wasn't Googling very effectively before. I've found the answer now and my first guess was right: feet-folks are foot-passengers.]

Anyway, I will be going to Whitby myself in just over a fortnight, along with the lovely [personal profile] lady_lugosi1313, to join a long weekend event marking the 40th anniversary of the Dracula Society's first official trip to that location. I don't have any particular plans to eat cured herring or drink tea (which I hate), but I won't turn down any nice cheap jet, and I will make a particular point of believing any and all legends of the macabre and supernatural which anyone tells me for the entire weekend - just to annoy Mr Swales.
strange_complex: (Dracula Risen hearse smile)
I spent last weekend in Whitby with various members of the Dracula Society - i.e. the same people I went to Romania with at the beginning of the summer. Back when I lived in Oxford, I attended the annual Whitby Gothic Weekend at least three times. As far as I remember they were the Aprils of 1999 and 2000 and the October of 2001, but I didn't have a livejournal back then to record the great events, so who knows! Anyway, between the fact that the WGW always falls during term-time, and that even from Leeds Whitby is still at least a two-hour journey away, I have failed to go again ever since. So when the Dracula Society chair let me know that a few members would be there in mid-September for a long weekend, it seemed like a good opportunity to put that right.

It wasn't a formal Society trip like the Romania visit - just a group of friends hanging out in a place of relevance to their interests, really. Most of the time we bimbled around the place, shopping, sitting in pubs and cafes, enjoying the local sights and so forth. But Julia (the Society chair) does like to look after us all, so she had recommended places for us to stay and made bookings at local restaurants for evening meals, while on the Sunday morning we all met up together and walked around some key sites of relevance to Stoker's novel and to the Dracula Society. For me, this made just the right balance, with plenty of opportunities to get together and do things, but also plenty of time to just wander, relax and bump into one another randomly.

I deliberately didn't take my digital camera, reasoning that I had been to Whitby and taken photos of it before, there are zillions of pictures of it all over the internet anyway, and I would prefer to just concentrate on being with people and experiencing the town. But of course once you get there, you get caught up in the beauty of it all, and our little walk around on the Sunday morning in particular brought up various things I wanted to photograph after all. So three cheers for smartphone cameras.

We began our walk by dropping in on the Great Man himself - or at least the guest-house where he and his family stayed when they visited Whitby )

Following the West Cliff round and turning as it does into the harbour mouth, you come to East Crescent, where this little row of houses looks out over the harbour itself )

Meanwhile, on the corner between the two where the cliff curves inland is the Royal Hotel, and in their lobby is a portrait of Bram Stoker donated by the Dracula Society on their first formal visit to Whitby in 1977 )

Actually, while I was in Whitby, Julia and her partner Adrian were kind enough to sit me down and show me a documentary made about the Society in 2003, its 30th anniversary, by one of its members who worked as an editor for the BBC. It includes interviews with the founder members, spliced together with a presenter's framing narrative, hand-held video footage of the trips they have taken over the years (including the earliest ones to Romania), and numerous spots on TV documentaries and quiz-shows. The Society was formed primarily to travel to Romania, but after a few years they decided to branch out and try some other things - hence the Whitby visit and the donation of the portrait in 1977. But honestly it was so funny hearing the founder members talking about the Whitby visit in the documentary, saying how obviously it had been quite difficult to plan it all from a distance. This from people who had already been to Romania while it still lay behind the Iron Curtain! Yes, Yorkshire is evidently alien indeed to people from That London...

By 1980, though, they had recovered enough from the experience to venture a return, and this time dedicate a bench in collaboration with the local council. I saw footage of the dedication ceremony too, in the documentary. In truth it is a bit of an Archimedes' bench by now, in that much of it has been replaced since 1980, including the dedicatory plaque. But it still sits proudly at the top of the Khyber Pass looking directly across the harbour towards the church and abbey on the East Cliff, and thus commemorating the various scenes in the novel when Mina and / or Lucy look in the same direction and see either Lucy and / or Dracula in the churchyard. The pictures below show both bench and view )

We gathered collectively at the bench at least twice for tuica brought back from the recent Romania trip and general collective toasting, as of course you would if you were in a town which contained a bench commemorating the Society you had come there with. Here, stolen from Julia's Facebook page (for which I hope she'll forgive me if she sees this!) is the group shot from the Sunday evening, taken before we all went for dinner in one of the restaurants on the west harbour pier.

DracSoc in Whitby.jpg

A lovely lot, all of them.

That was it for the (really very in)formal elements of the weekend, but while we were there plenty of us of course went up to the Abbey and inside the church )

It was strange all round, though, returning to the site of Whitby Gothic Weekends long past, and feeling the ghosts of that event and its people all around me. Even though it still goes on, for me it is something that belongs squarely at the turn of the century - and there I was again, doing almost the same thing, but not quite. Actually TBH one of the most striking differences was that back then I was a student, but now I have a salary, so that instead of staying in the cheapest places we could find, eating at takeaways and agonising over every tiny little purchase, I stayed in a luxurious room beautifully decorated in purple and gold, ate out at nice restaurants and Just Bought a pair of Whitby jet earrings (which I've always wanted) without worrying about it. Other than that, I hung out with people of a broadly gothic inclination, exchanged much the same kind of geeky in-jokes with them as Goths do, and enjoyed the Stoker-infused gothic atmosphere of the town. It was a little more about sharing a love of narrative and a little less about dressing up and listening to bands, but the lines are very blurry. Or maybe that was just all the tuica...?

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