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.

MARK TWAIN.

Writing isn’t always about writing. Sometimes reading strays across your plans. Then there’s maintenance to consider. I’d just filled in a form for the tax. This parchment was due under penalty of penalty.

   The scroll was destined for delivery and receipt before Hallowe’en. Why? Tax is so complex that the relevant department is literally arcane. Yes. Run by supernatural beings. Let us ponder the fiction of Mark Twain.

   Now he went back to his treasure-house, and carefully placed himself just as he had been standing when he tossed the marble away; then he took another marble from his pocket, and tossed it in the same way, saying:

   “Brother, go find your brother!”

   Tom Sawyer wishes to find a lost marble by means supernatural and arcane. He throws one bauble after the other. How absurd. Really? Not in the least. My work was interrupted by the need for maintenance. I will now relate that tale of woe.

   Things used every day tend to work just fine. Leave them be and they may fall apart while you aren’t looking. I use my computer daily. It’s a rare day that doesn’t see the machine switched on. Sleep aside, if I am away from my desk the break is never long.

   It is important to take breaks.

   I was on holiday. Returning, I found the house still stood. Gremlins walked all over the equipment in my absence. The computer monitor tired itself while I clambered over a foreign landscape looking for story material. Broken? The damned thing took ten minutes to wake.

   Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care. Ah, just one more quirky piece of equipment. The printer that insists on chewing every third envelope. I endure the quirk. Why? I run a near-paperless office. A few times each year, I’ll have to print an actual letter. There’s little point in upgrading to a new printer just to avoid a torn envelope.

   An office without quirks is a sterile place.

   One of my DVD drives refuses to open on the first use of the ejector. A second stab at the button does the trick. My shredder developed the tendency to gather most of my shredded material in its jaws and hoard the wedge for reasons best known to itself. This only becomes a problem when I attempt to empty the beast. Suddenly, the shredded flakes decide liberty has come. They seek the carpet. The carpet is welcoming.

   Quirks. Petty annoyances. You put up with them, until you don’t. After the second incident of sleepy monitor sickness, I’d had enough. I bought a cable to connect my television to the computer, and unplugged many many things.

   My computer sat in my office. I moved the machine to my library. For various reasons of the plot, the television isn’t moving from the room full of books. I tried the new arrangement. Sitting on the floor in front of the TV wasn’t a great solution.

   I decided to improvise. Why don’t I hunt that old PC monitor out of storage and try that? A temporary fix. Can’t do any harm. I moved many many things back to my office and plugged those things into other things. The ancient monitor was retrieved from storage.

   Cold storage. The garden hut, to be exact. After a spot of mountaineering inside the hut, I scrambled and clambered to my goal: a tired old monitor that had weathered a good and bad seven winters. In my office, an awkward cable was plugged into an awkward receptacle. Click. Fizz. Buzz. Zap.

   Everything worked. The monitor was darker. That was my only problem. I had difficulty gauging the state of my cover art on a darkened machine. My best option was to buy a small computer desk and shift everything back to the library. There, I’d use my TV as a monitor again.

   I braved the elements. This is a Scottish cliché meaning I went outdoors. Many a mile I trudged in search of self-assembly office equipment. The day was dry, and I had no fear of raindrops. More to the point, the cardboard box containing the desk had no fear of raindrops.

   At the edge of reason, and my library door, I assembled the creature. “It’s ali-ive!” This creation was a simple metal desk with a shelf beneath for the computer keyboard. I plugged many many things in and fixed them around the new desk.

   My library was now my office. The office was now somehow empty. My old computer desk had nothing to do but support a tired old monitor from the Dark Ages. In my library, a folding chair – interposed between PC desk and comfy TV chair – saw the job done.

   Word reached me that I’d be offered a new computer. Great. I could put that where the old machine once sat. My office’d be an office once more. All was right with the world. And so things went. My new computer, a free horse, was not examined in the mouth.

   Let me turn to this afternoon. I’d finished inscribing the illuminated manuscript with runes. The tax was fixed. Seated in my library, at my old computer, my world exploded. The new computer desk, with its sturdy construction, survived the explosion. My problem lay within the handy sliding shelf that held the keyboard.

   That shelf shattered on the left. I was showered with shotgun pellets. Tiny ball-bearings. They flew everywhere. I caught the free end of the shelf, and did my best to stop the keyboard from flying off. In this, I was unsuccessful. The keyboard gradually slid away and clattered onto some TV equipment stationed below.

   What went wrong? The shelf’s runner failed. I saw a tiny clip which still contained ball-bearings. Other, more rebellious, shiny pellets were scattered. I secured the shelf and gathered ball-bearings. Count those.

   Twelve spaces in the clip. That didn’t mean there were twelve steel trophies to be had. If twelve were packed in there initially, then yes. I couldn’t be certain of that. So I danced on the floor. Whirled and swirled like a dervish. My hands scoured the carpet for these missing steel spheres.

   I had to look. The basic components were all intact. Nothing sheared off. The shelf was fixable. Therefore, I had to look. The main body of the desk was perforated with circular holes. Those circles lay just shy of the size of each sphere. I found two bearings nestled on the desk in these circles.

   My swirling dance continued. I applied Cosmic Law. The spheres pinged all over the place. Most would be on the desk or lying in the carpet. Some may have popped and pinged into the nearby bin. A few could’ve loitered in the desk’s superstructure to the rear. I’d check.

   Where did I look? Everywhere, of course. I uncovered ten spheres and two tiny chunks of rock. Then I found an odd piece of plastic from nothing in particular. Under my chair I detected a crumb of fossilised food. Ew.

   One piece of twine later, I finished my search. Nothing more to see. The metallic glints in the carpet weren’t helping. I’d never considered the carpet to have a metallic pattern. Until I went hunting ball-bearings.

   Cosmic Law dictates that the impossible direction is the one in which hardened seekers must travel. I found myself behind the computer desk, swirling my hands on the floor in that strange low-level dance of mine. Cable after cable, I checked.

   Where were the two missing bearings? Patience is its own reward. Luckily, patience also rewarded me with the eleventh ball-bearing. I had marked one. Could I mark twain? Now all I had to do was uncover Judas. This twelfth apostle lay hidden. I turned my attention to deconstruction and reconstruction of the shelf.

   Bomb-disposal. I had to be careful. The old TV stand, glass, was now to the right and served as my printer stand. I definitely didn’t want to knock anything over onto that. Oops, seconds later, there flew the keyboard.

   Klunk.

   Ah, toughened glass. Glad to see that level of design in an otherwise fragile object. Be more careful. I’ll be much more careful than that. Clatter. Oops. Okay. Calm down. The design of the shelf is tricky. I’ll remove the shelf to get at the runners.

   This was achieved with minimal dropping and fumbling of bits I removed as I went along. (Believe me when I say a radical revision of the word minimal occurred in the previous sentence.) Finally, I had the eleven ball-bearings to hand. They could not be assembled in place. Resignedly, I knew I’d have to remove the left runner, flip that on its side, and apply the ball-bearings with great care.

   Situation. I’m one down. Judas has escaped me. What will I do anent that? I’ll try to fit the loose bearings inside the clip. Clatter. I drop a bearing. The metal globe rolls under the desk and settles on one of those small circular holes down there.

   “Brother, go find your brother!”

   The words come unbidden. I look right, to the nearest bookshelf. There sits Mark Twain’s story. Come on. Seriously? Am I going to follow in Tom Sawyer’s footsteps? The one place I haven’t looked is on the right of the floor-level bottom shelf. My tiny computer desk has no more secrets to relinquish.

   I haven’t looked on the right as the right side is taken up by the computer itself. There is no way that a ball-bearing could have ricocheted under there. As soon as this is put to me, I realise Cosmic Law dictates that the impossible direction is the one in which hardened seekers must travel.

   So it proves. Judas ricocheted under the rectangular computer. The twelfth apostle wormed its metallic way into hiding. Tom Sawyer helped me find the missing piece of that puzzle. I assembled everything with great skill and panache. (That is a lie.)

   After clumsily fumbling for eternity, I reassembled the whole runner. Bolted the tricky piece to the frame. Then watched in horror as the entire assembly pinged out again. Three bearings escaped. They clustered around the same dim part of my desk.

   I began again. With some cajoling, the job was done. I fixed the shelf into its awkward spot. There’s a tidy solution. Be wary when using the desk. That’s all. Yes, a flawed design was responsible. It’s possible to extend the shelf in full. Doing so on both sides extends the right side a shade further than the left. Leading to a twisting of the parts on the left. Twisting and popping of ball-bearings.

   The same is true in the other direction, when sliding the shelf away. There’s a slight uneven quality to an otherwise smooth operation. Why am I telling you this? Maintenance disrupted my writing routine. The least I could do was fashion a blog post out of the disruption.

   As for the circular black plastic clip that fell out of something, I’m sure I’ll learn where that came from. The item sits on my desk, mocking me. I am certain I dislodged the clip from one of many many things in my office/library.

   Pulling an item apart is followed by assembling that item and declaring it fixed. If you don’t have any spare parts at the end of the process, Cosmic Law dictates that you are doing something wrong. I considered throwing the clip away, to see if the thing might find its brother…

   In the time it took to write this blog post, I discovered another two black plastic clips. I can’t throw one away to locate more. If I do that, I may be swamped. Nothing appears broken or wobbly for a lack of three black circular clips. If the last you hear of me is that I was felled by an unsecured bookcase, consider the mystery solved.

NEXT BLOG: OBITUARY. MISSY BIOZARRE.