BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA…AGAIN: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Come to this blog freely, go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring.
   Regularly, I place tree-based data-storage devices on tree-based data-storage devices. Paper books on wooden shelves. Books come in and must be stored somewhere.
   I know, yes, I know. Books come in and books don’t go out, and there’s always a Bookpocalypse looming. New books must be read. Yet…
   Old books can be read again.
   And so…I turned, once more, to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. What is a classic? Stoker’s tale is certainly that, but what’s the definition? We might as well go with Alan Bennett’s remark: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.
   Have I read this classic work or…did I only watch the move/TV adaptation? In watching an adaptation, would I be shocked and surprised, on reading the book, to discover that diabolical liberties had been taken?
   Classics I’ve read. Time for a very brief list in no particular order. Strong Poison. Tom Sawyer. Jane Eyre. Treasure Island. Wuthering Heights. Dracula. Frankenstein.
   Adaptations, flattened to fit a two-hour movie-slot, are always going to be patchy. Better to go for lengthier TV adaptations, in which fewer diabolical liberties are taken. If you have a dedicated reading-space, and coffee, then stick with the originals if you can’t bear to see a much-loved classic knifed from all directions.
   Curl up with a good book, and pretend the awful motion-picture does not exist. (Round up the usual suspects. You know the drill.)
   Dracula opens with a lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travelling to Count Dracula’s quaint home to assist in legal matters when it comes to moving house. Spoiler. Oh, and the Count is a vampire.
   When we leave the castle behind, things don’t look too good for the abandoned lawyer. London is Dracula’s target, and Stoker fills the text with characters. Fictional London, aye, and Fictional Whitby, are both fair teeming with characters.
   Dracula’s thirst for blood is matched by the workman’s thirst for alcohol, judging by the many friendly bribes that aid the vampire hunters in their investigations.
   In the opening of this tale, at the castle, in the severe vampiric wilderness, there are precious few characters. Indeed, it is Harker’s realisation that the Count’s home is empty of servants that raises more and more suspicion in his fevered mind.
   Harker is left to the lack of mercy of Dracula’s three undead minions. Few other characters visit the castle. Over in the pub-filled stamping-ground of humanity, Stoker throws characters our way thick and fast.
   Here lies the problem of dealing with adaptations of the tale. Many characters are many characters too many. In the book, there’s space for these choir-like assemblies of voices and their different methods of conveying story. Hardly anything truly happens directly in Dracula…
   We are given a collection of notes. Letters. Diaries. Newspaper articles. Stoker warns us of the existence of many receipts and bills of lading and railway timetables, but he doesn’t bog us down in those.
   The novel is written, pencilled in, penned, typed up, noted in shorthand, and gathered at the edges by means of newspaper stories. Characters frantically chronicle that morning’s events while on the afternoon train to the next vampire hunter meeting, which, itself, will be noted in print much later.
   Only with Doctor Seward and his phonograph in action do we occasionally stumble upon an event that is happening while his recording device is in motion.
   That brings me to his patient: R.M. Renfield. Our lost lawyer friend, Mr Harker, arranged Dracula’s purchase of a property right next to Doctor Seward’s very Victorian asylum. Dracula’s new temporary abode isn’t spooky enough by itself. His new lair needs Edward Gorey levels of lunacy on neighbouring soil.
   It isn’t long before Dracula is at the asylum window, having late-night chats with Mr Renfield. They share an interest in blood. There’s a much-used method running through adaptations, to save screen-time, of condensing characters into one role…
   For some reason, it is fated to Renfield, across adaptations, to merge with the character of Jonathan Harker. Renfield/Harker is often the first condensed casualty in a Dracula adaptation. It seems that writers are hell-bent on turning the patient into the lawyer.
   The lawyer is mobile. Renfield, however, is an inmate who engages in brief bursts of movement when he escapes the confines of his cell. It’s a shame that he’s the first of many elements to go, as…
   He’s vital to the plot.
   In movies, Renfield can come across as a minor character. In the book, though, he’s significant. For a novel named Dracula, we find Dracula himself conspicuous by his absence. Stoker wisely has Dracula conspiring offstage for much of the action.
   Various unrelated newspaper accounts track Dracula’s bursts of activity across the map of London. When he appears in person, he takes the centre of the stage.
   Bram Stoker, should you look him up, would be remembered chiefly as a figure of the theatre had he not written Dracula. He kept one eye on adapting his story to the stage, after all. (And his theatrical version predated the book’s publication by the barest whisper of a vampiric sigh.)
   So don’t be surprised by the Victorian theatricality of a Victorian novel penned by a theatrical fellow. Stoker was not just any theatre-lover, but assistant to noted actor Sir Henry Irving. Much has been made of Dracula’s habits and their alignment with the temperament and physicality of Sir Henry.
   Adaptations sent me to the source, and I found I much-preferred the source. Dracula wasn’t the first vampire story, and it certainly wasn’t ever going to be the last. Stoker threw an undead quote into the book by mentioning the poem Lenore, so we see vampiric roots from an earlier time appearing in the novel itself.
   And it is to poetry that we’d look, in search of early vampire tales that were written down. Before that, as usual, to stave off the mystery of the night, you’d be huddled around a campfire trying to keep people entertained.
   If that campsite happened to be the Villa Deodati at Lake Geneva, and you knew Byron or Shelley, then the stories told would chill the very marrow of your bones. From that rain-lashed place, two classic works emerged.
   We’ll call one Frankenstein. And, just like the later Dracula, this tale faces knives from all directions when being adapted. For reasons of cheapness, a trip into the icy wastes at the novel’s end is a trip too far for most movie budgets. That chill journey is often replaced by a lab explosion.
   The other spooky story from out of Lake Geneva, scribbled by John Polidori, is titled The Vampyre. Today we’d call it highly literary revenge-porn against Lord Byron. The Villa Deodati was the prototype of an internet forum where a teenager could publish her grave-robbing fan-fic without fear of cancellation.
   A forum like that always has an edgy character in there, floating on the periphery while aiming barbed taunts at the centre, and that’s pretty much Polidori’s role in the literary space.
   Polidori gave us the aristocratic vampire preying on young women. Lord Ruthven, the vampire, or vampyre, is based on a man who had little time for the undead – Byron, though there’s a cottage industry out there trying to convince us of his own vampirism. But this blog post is about Count Dracula and not Lord Byron, and I fear we must move on before sunrise surprises us.
   In short, it’s a good while after The Vampyre before we reach Dracula, by way of Varney the Vampire and other literary routes most quaint and curious. For completeness, we should add alternative titles to the well-known tales…
   Frankenstein is all about The Modern Prometheus. Varney’s vampiric saga also travels under the guise of The Feast of Blood, and a last-minute change to Dracula deprives us of the story named The Un-Dead.
   If we are to believe the notion that Lord Byron was (and remains to this day) a real-life vampire, then we must go along with the awkward literary notion that Byron wrote everything. He penned The Vampyre, scribbled Frankenstein, created Sherlock, and wrote up his exploits as Varney…
   And then “in retirement” Byron went on to write Dracula, The Railway Children, 1984, The Phantom Menace, several episodes of the TV soap EastEnders, and, in a failed attempt at dispelling the mythology, this very blog post.
   My point, in detouring through this graveyard and that cobbled street, is to consider Dracula against the backdrop of a blood-red sky as we approach the setting of the sun. There’s before Stoker’s novel and after…
   Before, you certainly had the aristocratic vampire in fiction. After, you had a legion of aristocratic vampires. You can hardly move through fiction without encountering Count Orlok (Dracula, hiding from copyright law), Countess Dracula, Count Yorga, or every edgy aristocratic vampire character from the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade.
   As to that last, I fervently avoided the aristocratic cliché when playing the game. When you think of roleplaying games and aristocratic vampires, you are led in the direction of Dungeons & Dragons and D&D’s very own Dracula photocopy, Count Strahd von Zarovich, ruler of Barovia. (Curiously, Dungeons & Dragons emerged from the American Lake Geneva. Coincidence? Byron wrote the Monster Manual, obviously.)
   Your mileage in subverting vampiric cliché in your own fiction will vary – for the dead ride quickly – but, damn it, over in the fantasy world of D&D, the Hammer Horror treatment comes across as a bite refreshing…
   Moving swiftly on…
   I revisited Dracula. It is a dramatic telling of Johnny Foreigner invading London. You can see the tabloid headlines today…
   EASTERN EUROPEAN CRIME LORD AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CORRUPTS ENGLISH ROSE…AND MILKS OUR BENEFIT SYSTEM. HE’S EXPLOITING THE NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE AND HAVING A LAUGH WHILE ABOUT IT.
   Of note, I once stepped onto Ellis Island and straight into the viewing of a play on illegal immigrant Bela Lugosi’s acceptance into America. On his side, he wasn’t an actual vampire. And, today, if a vampire like Lord Byron came out of “retirement” and promised to use his vast and secret fortune to fund his own happy meals from out of a blood bank, would we use vampire as a term of abuse?
   We’re human. Of course we would. (I have to say we’re human. This camouflages the fact that the blog post was written by Lord Byron, and is fresh to print from his holiday hideaway retirement cottage in Transylvania. Cottage. Castle. The terms are interchangeable.)
   There’s so much lore around the creation of Dracula, and of Frankenstein before it, that the best thing to do is ignore all the psychobabble and delve straight into the words. Visit these books. Revisit these books. Judge for yourselves.
   I like Dracula for the framing of the story. Readers are invited to piece together the narrative as the clues come in. It’s a Victorian detective piece, and you are forgiven if you end up wondering where Sherlock Holmes is in all this.
   Stoker’s novel is out of copyright, and the Dracula/Holmes crossover is not the original idea it once was. There’s a well-worn path from Baker Street to Castle Dracula, now. I have at least one comic book adaptation on the shelves, around here, somewhere.
   From time to time, I revisit works. Some books are worth reading again, even though unread books glare at me as I pass them by to remove the stake from Stoker’s novel one more time. In literary terms, Dracula is bound to outlive all of us. The book is still in print to this day, and has taken on an Un-Life all of its own. It’s better for a classic to be an Un-Dead book than an unread one.