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An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker

(www.bbc.com)
268 points lermontov | 2 comments | 21 Oct 24 16:14 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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staticman2 ◴[21 Oct 24 19:00 UTC] No.41907241[source]▶
I remember reading somewhere- I think it was in an annotated addition of Dracula, or maybe it was a journal article- that said that Bram Stoker wrote a large number of novels but everything he wrote other than Dracula was awful. Per Wikipedia he wrote 14 books, supposedly he was only able to write one good one.
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reaperducer ◴[21 Oct 24 19:15 UTC] No.41907394[source]▶
I suspect you're getting downvoted by people who haven't actually read anything by Stoker.

My wife has read most of his stuff. I know because I buy it for her. She says aside from Dracula, most of it is not great.

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timeinput ◴[21 Oct 24 20:16 UTC] No.41908080[source]▶
For me it feels like Stokers dracula is only so popular because it's where all the tropes come from, not because it's particularly well written, or something like that.

It's one of those firsts that established a genre.

I know Stoker didn't invent vampires, but they came into western English speaking culture through his Dracula.

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1. staticman2 ◴[22 Oct 24 01:21 UTC] No.41910269[source]▶
I don't know, Stroker does some interesting stuff in Dracula, essentially it's this Victorian hysterical story about extramarital or premarital sex "ruining" women (in this cases, essentially turning them into undead monsters as an extended metaphor for a woman's reputation being ruined in victorian society) as the cuckolded Victorian gentleman look in horror until they figure out the source of the trouble-- a no good foreigner.

There's also a sub-theme of the too secular modern men who don't believe in superstition (Jonathan Harker doesn't believe in vampires in the beginning) needing to get in better touch with Christianity to defeat Dracula- and features a rejection of secular psychiatry to defeat what turns out to not be "mental illness" way before The Exorcist did it.

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2. AStonesThrow ◴[22 Oct 24 02:50 UTC] No.41910742[source]▶
It took me nearly 50 years before I learned how thoroughly gay Dracula really was. It was, of course, replete with coded references, and couldn't overtly depict homosexuality, so it was with Oscar Wilde, such as The Importance of Being Earnest.

Sadly I had really bought into the vampire chic trend when Coppola's Dracula came out in the early 90s. I had my dentist create some fangs for me to wear. More than one woman formally requested me to bite them on the neck. I dressed for goth clubs, more or less like an Anne Rice vampire (another thoroughly gay mythos).

It wasn't until Stephenie Meyer claimed vampires for the Latter-Day Saints movement that those Twilight sparkling dudes could be considered thoroughly hetero.