Bram Stoker Books

As my title says, this is indeed a nice collection of Stoker's lesser known works. It also includes "Dracula's Guest" which was cut from the original masterpiece of Victorian terror. This short story being perhaps the best in the volume. The stories range from the excellent to the hum-drum. I took away one star for that reason.

Either way, I'd recommend this book....if you can find a copy.

Bram Stoker brought to life one of the greatest horror stories known to English literature. In Stoker's Dracula, a group of trustworthy friends work together to solve the mystery of a haunting battle between good and evil. In the novel, a young man named Jonathon arrives in Transylvania to arrange new housing for a "man" known to as Count Dracula. Later, after Jonathon's objectionable visit and his return home, his friends discover mysterious occurrences within their own town. Little does anyone know a creature haunts them in the night and it will take all they have to uncover the mystery of what lurks with them in the shadows. Dracula is not just a tale of horror, but a thriller that leaves you wanting more with mysterious twists around every terrifying corner.

As you can no doubt tell from the title, this book contains three of Bram Stoker's works. Personally, I do not think these are three of his best.

Without doubt, the collection would not make sense without "Dracula." It is simply the text and has no notes for the reader. The good thing is that it does have plenty of room on the margins for making notes for your use.

In the late eighties and early nineties, it was hard to get a copy of "The Lair of the White Worm." You can know find it in paperback. After reading it, you will see that it is not exactly like the abysmal movie with Hugh Grant.

Although the movie hinted at vampirism, there is no hint of vampirism here which raises the question, "Why include it in a Dracula Omnibus?" This story brings a sentient monster that has been alive beneath England, a voodoo master, and a mesmerist. Not too bad a combination, but it has the feel of two stories fighting each other. Also, we witness the power of Mimi, but never really get to read much about her.

The final selection, "Dracula's Guest," was published posthumously. I don't recall seeing it in paperback by itself, although there is a hardcover edition available. "Dracula's Guest" is typically part of another selection. This is not a novel, but a collection of stories.

Is this a worthwhile investment? If you like Bram Stoker's work, this is a nice hardcover to put up on the shelf. You have "Dracula" and a couple more works to boot. Aside from an introduction from the editor, there are no frills with this edition.

Dover's collections of ghost, horror, and mystery stories are among the best deals in the paperback book world. I read this volume around Halloween, and it made what little hair I have left curl and vanish. The quality of the individual stories varies greatly, with the best being "Wandering Willie's Tale" by Sir Walter Scott, "Doctor Heidegger's Experiment" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the much-anthologized "The Horla" by Guy de Maupassant. Also included is the classic "The Monkey's Paw" by W. W. Jacobs and "Dracula's Guest" by Bram Stoker. In all, there are eighteen different stories by sixteen authors.

My copy of the book was purchased some many years ago and still looks great for a paperback, so you don't have to feel any compunctions buying a used copy in good condition.

This book will give you many hours of scary enjoyment. What more can I say?

FYI: This is the Barnes and Noble "Collector's Library" edition, one of a series of inexpensive but nicely-bound hardback editions of the classics that are produced specifically for sale in the chain bookstore; hence it would only be available used through Amazon. I reviewed it since it is the edition I read.

The dictionary definition of lurid, overwrought Victorian melodrama, Bram Stoker's Dracula is the authentic source of every recognizable cliché mined in the derivative and increasingly insipid generations of vampire books and movies which have followed it. Garlic, stakes to the heart, "sacred" (not silver) bullets, reflectionless mirrors--they're all here.

Still, Stoker tells an interesting story, perhaps at this remove as interesting for its unconscious fears and fashions as for its drama, romance, and horror. Stoker uses the convention of a written record that in the brief coda the surviving team members fear will not be believed because most of it is typewritten, and thus will be considered inauthentic! Yes, these brave warriors used the latest of technology to battle their ancient enemy--typewriters, phonograph recordings, telegraphs, revolvers, modern medicine, trains, and steam launches--but finally best him with the traditions (stakes and garlic, certainly a gastronomic delight) and faith of the past).

Along the way, Stoker reveals the fear of powerful and empowered women who enjoy their sexuality openly, as the vampiric women are depicted, in opposition to the proper pale frigidity and coquetry of the favored Victorian breed of woman. The power of Dracula is largely an erotic one, most explicitly expressed in the story when the once-bitten and not quite twice-shy heroine is made by Dracula to lick the blood off his chest, an obvious metaphor for forms of sexual conduct obviously not spoken of in the best parlours.

Interestingly, it is Dracula and his all-female vampiric converts who are described in terms most appealing to us today. They are passionate, active, open, cynical, ironic, and ruddily healthy (all that red meat--er, blood--in the diet, you know), while the "good guys" seem pale, standoffish, and mannered to the point of too-cool lifelessness, a word which is both richly ironic and pointedly accurate in its description.

But that's all under the surface. The story framework "as told by" journals, letters, newspaper clippings allows Stoker to give many characters first-person place in the story, sometimes describing scenes from two first-person perspectives. This convention keeps the story moving quickly, and Stoker's transitions are plausible and drive the action, which is surprisingly deeper and broader than the secondary-source movies most of us have referenced at some point in our cultural history.

Only a small percentage of the story at beginning and end is set in Dracula's castle, an eerie set piece in Transylvania that the movies have captured well. Most of the action takes place in London, where Dracula has bought property to be close to a fresh food supply and converts to his undead army. The unsuspecting Jonathan Harker, who was the unwitting enabler of this relocation, is the first of the "good guys" to be drawn into the battle, but unlike often depicted in the movies, this is not a mano a mano battle; Jonathon is joined by his wife, her best friend's widowed husband and two male friends (a love quadrangle fraught with sexual titillation even after she turned down the two friends for her eventual husband), and a noted doctor. We have a lawyer, psychiatrist, doctor, explorer, and royalty (all men, of course) and the genteel women whom they pursue--not a peasant amongst them. The class divide is evident as the story develops; money and time (nobody in this crowd is bothered with working, careers, or even maintaining themselves or their households; that's for the presumably under-the-stairs servants) will among the modern weapons arrayed against old-school Dracula (whose piles of money in the castle are neglected and never used in a dust filled room).

So the net is a fun horror-filled ride through London and Transylvania, with enough cultural and historical interest irony and subtext to sustain humor and interest the whole way through.

In a world of modern technology and advancements that could ask the questions of God and life there is Dracula. whos mere prescence declares that there are things which could not be explained by science. The book is well written and leaves the reader largely unaware of the terrors lurking in the night. I read this book to get a feel of the vampire roots. i was not let down. That was until the end. when dracula and all the demonic creations were finished off so quickly that it felt more like a cop out rather than the ending to a masterpiece. that i was expecting. On the whole the book was fantastic. Until the end.

Dracula's guest employs some of the creepy local folk tales and legends. The significance of a blue flame from the ground, the howling of wolves, that sort of thing.

Here, a coachman in a coach drawn by midnight black horses, picks up a traveller. He is growing increasingly freaked out all the time.

Whoa, that story is cold. If you are going to be put off by two evil psychopathic boys plotting to draw the father of two babies into blowing the heads off his babies with a shotgun, then stay well away.

I was surprised at the style of this bio -- not purely chronological, that's for sure! Murray takes us through Bram's life, but shows us so many "links" and connections to well-known people of the time that I wish more could be uncovered about this surprising writer. As a young man he and his family were friends of the Wilde's, and growing up with Oscar Wilde had to be a trip in itself. And yet Bram was also raised in conservatively Christian values, and as he matured he was extremely opposed to various forms of indecency, even to the point of favoring censorship. He and his wife had one child, apparently did not care for the 'baby experience,' and thereafter his wife supposedly was frigid as well. So what's a healthy guy to do, especially if he manages a popular London theatre (working around all those actors all day!) and is acquainted with an enormous number of society people of the day? Friend of Walt Whitman when he was a young man, friend of Mark Twain in mid-life, and friend of Winston Churchill near the end of his life. Writer, of course, of Dracula, but also several other gothic novels and stories. Oh yes, and Bram died from the effects of what was most probably syphillis. Stoker is a complex character in his own right, and my only dissatisfaction with the book is that Murray could not tell us more.

Originally published in 1903, some six years after Dracula, Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars is a singular work of dark fantasy. It reads as if it were one of the author's earliest writings, espousing a much more awkward style than that which permeates Stoker's most famous novel. The characters are stereotypical of the time, the dialogue is sometimes forced and so Victorian in its manner that it fails to draw the reader fully into the story, and it leaves too many unanswered questions in its wake. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this, Stoker's most familiar novel after Dracula, is its storyline built around the resurrection of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Few people today realize that Stoker not only truly defined the vampire genre, he helped give rise to the mummy genre as well. By far the most fascinating aspect of this tale is its ending, though, which I will discuss below.

The first several chapters of the novel call to my mind the host of whodunit films released in the 1940s and 1950s. Malcolm Ross, a barrister, is called to the home of Margaret Trelawney, a young lady he just recently met and took a fancy to, in the middle of the night. When he arrives at the home, he finds policemen, a doctor, Margaret, and the household staff in a great tizzy over an attack made upon Margaret's father. The man was found on the floor of his room, his left arm slashed in a number of places. The investigation begins, and a constant watch is held over the injured man, who has fallen into a cataleptic state. The next night, under the eyes of Ross, Margaret, and a nurse, a second baffling attack takes place by an unknown assailant. It soon becomes apparent that the person behind the attacks is attempting to gain access to the safe located in the room. Suspicions abound as both the police and the doctor are baffled by the situation. At this point, we begin to learn the history of the Egyptian relics housed in the Trelawney house and hear the story of the ancient Egyptian queen Tera and her apparent plans for reincarnating herself with the help of a beautiful jewel of seven stars, the very item housed in Trelawney's safe. The novel ends with a Great Experiment in which Tera's plans for a rebirth are carried out, the results of which fail to satisfy this reader.

Published in 1903, this novel is steeped in Victorian idealism, particularly in its treatment of Margaret and the courtship between her and Malcolm. Modern readers may find this aspect of the novel either romantic or silly. In addition, the respectful and entirely proper conversations between characters, especially in times of suspicion or fear, may seem strikingly quaint to today's readers. The second half of the novel, which tells the story of the ancient mummy and lays the groundwork for the climax of the Great Experiment, is much more interesting than the preceding pages, yet there are elements to the evolving story that fail to make perfect sense.

The Jewel of Seven Stars is unique in that it features two different endings, neither of which fully satisfies. The accepted version, which you will find in modern publications, is not the original ending but is instead a rewrite first found in the 1919 edition of the novel. It is anticlimactic at best and seems oddly different from the novel as a whole. There is actually some speculation that the final couple of pages of this ending were not even written by Stoker, who was dead and buried seven years prior to this amended edition's release. The original 1903 ending is a much better if rather shocking conclusion to a story that openly hints of ancient horrors; it is a pity that the original ending has been superseded by a questionable and quite dissatisfying rewrite. In any case, though, The Jewel of Seven Stars is an interesting if flawed novel that shows few signs of the literary magic with which Stoker's masterpiece, Dracula, is infused.