The Lair of the White Worm - Bram Stoker

 It's not really a secret that Bram Stoker never equalled anything like the success of Dracula, even though Dracula wasn't that big success in his lifetime.  However, Lair of the White Worm is very disappointing.  You feel the inky thumbprint of Dracula all over it: ridiculously trite love affairs; the Byronic or Irving-esque anti-hero; the arrow-straight man of action from overseas.  The main interest is Lady Arabella March of Diana's Grove, who has set her cap, for financial reasons, at the newly returned Edgar Caswell of Castra Regis, who is, perhaps wisely, more interested in the gigantic kite he flies to scare off birds.

The setting is also of interest: the Vale of Cheshire, which has a deep a history as Dracula's Transylvania.  It is contemporary Cheshire and thus railways play a major role.  It was a rare highlight when the gigantic serpent chased the train most of the way to Liverpool.  Mainly, though, it is very silly and not at all frightening.  The monster is absurd, its linkage with Arabella not thought through, and there are far too many deferred conversations, conveniently putting off gobbets of key information.

It's interesting, particularly for devotees of the genre, but not much more.  It would have fared much better as a novella than as a novel.

Ghost Light - Joseph O'Connor

 I enjoyed Shadowplay, O'Connor's novel about Bram Stoker and Henry Irving, but Ghost Lights is even better.  It"s an evocation of the affair between the dying genius of the Irish National Theatre, J M Synge, and his street urchin muse Molly Allgood, who starred, under her stage name Maire O'Neill, as Pegeen in his subversive masterwork Playboy of the Western World.

Forty-five years on from Synge's death and Molly is living alone in London, only her cat and the drink for company.  Today, however, in late October 1952, she has a gig - an old admirer has booked her for a BBC radio play, and Molly has the entire day to ensure she gets there on time.  As she walks through autumnal London she polishes her memories of better times, as a teenage actress in Dublin, of Synge and his eccentric courtship.

It is all beautifully done.  The tragedy that strikes at the end is so masterfully handled that I was almost overwhelmed.  Dublin, London and New York are all vibrantly conjured.  I recognised the foyer of Old Broadcasting House; the same for Molly as it was for me a quarter-century later.  It is only more recently that I have come to realise how important the Abbey Players and the Playboy were to the emergence of a radical arts theatre around the world.  I think I read the Playboy for the first time around the time Joseph O'Connor was writing Ghost Light.  What took me so long, I wonder?  Don't know that I would have appreciated it properly had I been any younger.  By God, I get it now - and I loved Ghost Light for reminding me.

Shadowplay - Joseph O'Connor

 

Modern fiction at its very best, Shadowplay is the story of the triumvirate that brought London's Lyceum Theatre its greatest days at the very end of the 19th century - Sir Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and Bram Stoker, their general manager, who knocked off his best-known novel in his spare time.  One theory maintains that Count Dracula was based on Irving, so the vampire theme lies across O'Connor's story.  There are also fun jokes - for example, Jonathan Harker, the young scenic whizz hired by Stoker, turns out to be a cross-dressing young woman, thereafter known as 'Harks'.  Mina is the name given to the theatre ghost and some of the best writing here is about the ephemeral jaunts of the long-dead spirit.  Mina's room is the abandoned space inside the theatre where Stoker does his writing.  This being the 1880s, for the most part, Jack the Ripper is here too.  But at heart it's a three-handed love story; for all their wildly inappropriate behaviour the three principals are all emotionally tied to one another for life.  O'Connor brings their world beautifully alive.  He is a major contemporary writer.  As a token of how good he is, I draw your attention to the end Coda - totally unnecessary, far too long, and yet so achingly written I wouldn't want to lose a single word.

The Revenge of Dracula - Peter Tremayne

Revenge is the second of Tremayne's trilogy Dracula Lives! Some years ago I reviewed the first, Dracula Unborn, on this blog.

Each novel comes at Dracula from a different angle. Unborn was the story of the dynasty in the 16th century; Revenge moves us on three hundred years to the foundation of modern Romania in the mid 19th century. Upton Welsford, like Jonathan Harker in Stoker's original, has gone mad and is writing his story from an asylum. In 1861 Welsford is private secretary to a permanent secretary at the Foreign Office. As such he will go with the official party to the independence day celebrations in Bucharest. This could be the making of his career ... but before he goes he buys a quaint jade dragon in a junk shop and starts suffering nightmares in which he is part of an ancient Egyptian cult worshipping the said dragon. In these dreams he is sacrificed by a beautiful priestess, who soon appears in London, suffering exactly the same dreams. Welsford and Clara fall in love, then Clara is abducted and taken to, of all places, Romania - specifically the land beyond the trees, Transylvania.


Tremayne writes popular adventure fiction of the highest standard. He is very much in the tradition of Bram Stoker and Rider Haggard (of whom he has written a biography). The Dracula trilogy dates from the Seventies, around the time the author turned 30. The Signet omnibus, which I own, seems to hint at a TV or film tie-in, but I know of no movie versions. They are simultaneously of their era and faithful to Stoker's original. They expand the lore and are well worth checking out.

Carmilla - Sheridan le Fanu

Perfect for Christmas night reading, Carmilla is effectively the mother of Dracula. John Polidori was the father, with Lord Byron a sort of fairy godfather. Polidori's The Vampyre came out in 1819, originally credited to Byron in the hope of bigger sales. In fact The Vampyre was Byron, thinly veiled under the name Lord Ruthven, the name he had appeared under in Glenarvon (1816), a scandalous bodice-ripper by Byron's spurned mistress Lady Caroline Lamb. Carmilla - likewise a novella - came out in 1871 and derives from the legend of Hungarian noblewoman Elizabeth Bathory, who is said to have preserved her beauty by bathing in the blood of young virgins. A quarter of a century later along came Bram Stoker to combine to two - all he needed to find was another medieval Eastern European blood fiend, preferably one with a catchy name.

Stoker was a Dubliner, like le Fanu, and it is inconceivable that he should not have known Carmilla. He was working, in Dublin, for a newspaper co-owned by le Fanu when the story came out in serial form in late 1871. He may or may not have known of Polidori. The term 'vampire' was not original and indeed is deployed in Carmilla. Modern screen Draculas may have a whiff of Byron about them but Stoker's Dracula, in the novel, does not. Indeed the only thing Stoker seems to have added to what le Fanu supplied, aside from material lifted from the life of Vlad Tepez, is the vampiric means of transmission. The bite itself passing on the contagion seems original to Stoker. Le Fanu has some obscure device of vampires infecting suicides and I'm not sure that the question of transmission arises in Polidori (it certainly doesn't in Byron's 'fragment' "The Burial".

Carmilla was written at the very end of le Fanu's life, by which time you would hope he had developed a graceful turn of phrase. Sadly, a lifetime's slog as a journalistic hack seems to have undermined his prose, which plods somewhat. On the other hand his structure is very clever, a story within a framework, which then admits other stories. The frisson that made it successful, however, is the implied lesbianism between Carmilla and the narrator Laura. Given that Laura speaks to us directly we can be safe in the assumption she did not die. The victim is Berthe, ward of General Spielsdorf, the neighbour and friend of Laura's father in Styria. We only see Carmilla as beautiful and loving and extremely sexual. It is Spielsdorf who later reveals what she really is and how she must be destroyed - which, incidentally, is done in the way familiar to all Dracula fans. The learned man who assists at the destruction is Baron Vordenburg of Graz, who is described thus:

He was tall, narrow-chested, stooping, with high shoulders, and dressed in black. His face was brown and dried in with deep furrows; he wore an oddly-shaped hat with a broad leaf. His hair, long and grizzled, hung on his shoulders. He wore a pair of gold spectacles, and walked slowly, with an odd shambling gait, with his face sometimes turned up to the sky, and sometimes bowed down toward the ground, and seemed to wear a perpetual smile; his long thin arms were swinging, and his lank hands, in old black gloves ever so much too wide for them, waving and gesticulating in utter abstraction.

Small wonder, then, that Stoker preferred to combine Vordenburg's knowledge of vampiric lore with the more reassuring professional person of Doctor Hesselius. to whom Laura's narrative is addressed - et voila, Van Helsing!


Le Fanu doesn't do bats but there is an animal entity. In the most horrific passage of the novella a monstrous cat - 'four or five feet long' - pounces on Laura's bed.

The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream.

Intriguingly, le Fanu leaves a major question unanswered - who is the mysterious 'Countess' who claims to be Carmilla's mother but who dumps her daughter first on Spielsdorf, then on Laura's father. She meets Spielsdorf at a masked ball and refuses to unmask for him because. she insists, he will recognise her. Did le Fanu simply forget? I doubt it; the encounters with the Countess are allotted too much space within the hundred pages of the novella. Perhaps le Fanu planned to bring her back in a follow-up story. After all, Carmilla was one of five stories published in In A Glass Darkly (1872), all of which were presented as being from the papers of Doctor Hesselius, who thus became the first occult detective. Sadly, le Fanu died early the following year before he could publish more.

 

The Lair of the White Worm - Bram Stoker

It's coming up to Halloween and I just love these Penguin yellowbacks.  I saw this and couldn't resist.

Bram Stoker was a one-novel writer - and what a novel Dracula is.  Unfortunately he wrote several other novels of which Lair of the White Worm is one.  It may be the best but we are talking a bad bunch, one of which, The Man, is just execrable.

The Lair of the White Worm is not execrable.  It's tosh.  Young Adam Salton is brought from Australia to (gawd 'elp 'im) rural Staffordshire as the chosen heir to his elderly great uncle, who plays no further part.  Instead Adam is taken up by the former diplomat and historian of Mercia Sir Nathaniel, who tells him all about the strange Caswalls of Castra Regis and druidic Diana's Grove aka the titular Lair.  There follows a load of guff, including a giant bird-scarer kite and a series of unfortunate mongooses.  There is also a lot of jaw-dropping racism concerning Caswall's black African servant Oolanga, which I fancy was a bit strong even for the Edwardian era.

It all comes to a sort of life when we realise that Lady Arabella is actually the physical embodiment of the Worm.  This comes as no surprise given that she dresses in white, wears tinted glasses, waves her arms about in serpentine manner and tears mongooses in half.  The worm itself is massive so where it all goes when it's in human form beats me.  Ultimately there's a storm with no rain, the kite does what it was always going to do and conducts lightning down to Diana's Grove which goes spectacularly bang, scattering bits of age-old worm all over Staffordshire.

The writing is medium grade pulp, full of discordant word choices and irritating habits - the number of times Sir Nathaniel says "Let's continue our discussion of this important matter when we've had dinner/lunch/supper/a kip/a walk etc. drove me insane.

The London Satyr - Robert Edric

On the face of it, a novel about Victorian pornographers; in reality a carefully crafted, utterly non-salacious novel about the compromises we have to make in life and how, so often, the battle to get ahead and perhaps even escape ends up sucking us deeper into the mire, achoring us ever more firmly to our rung on society's descending scale.

Webster is a middling professional photographer, not good enough to survive as an independent but just about good enough to take photos of the costumes in Henry Irving's productions at the Lyceum so that Irving's manager, Bram 'Mother' Stoker, can add them to his obsessive lists and inventories.

Webster has accidentally hit upon a way of earning a few bob on the side.  He lends the costumes to the pornographer Marlow, who has a lucrative line in photos of women getting out of said clothing.  Webster takes a shine to Marlow's partner Pearl and, one lucky night, finds himself invited to an evening of tableaux vivantes at Marlow's place.

Webster is a man of modest ambitions: he doesn't want to leave his frigid wife and appalling (but highly entertaining) daughter, he just wants to build himself up in their regard.  He wouldn't in theory mind getting up close and personal with the enigmatic Pearl but in practice can't even bring himself to have it away with the young skivvy who offers him anything he fancies on the proverbial plate.

Then a debased artisto murders a child prostitute.  The London Vigilance Committee launches a crusade (this is after all 1891, only three years on from the Ripper's Autumn of Terror), and Webster realises just how deeply he has been drawn in to the sex business.  Worse, Stoker announces a complete stock-take and Marlow, who has several of the items Stoker wants to find, has fled abroad.

Incredibly entertaining, finely judged in terms of its moral standpoint, and beautifully written.  Why isn't Edric better known?  He has won and been shortlisted for most of the major prizes but I'd never come across him before.  My tip: get to know his considerable ouevre forthwith.