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

(www.bbc.com)
323 points lermontov | 1 comments | 21 Oct 24 16:14 UTC | HN request time: 0.229s | 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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red369 ◴[21 Oct 24 23:40 UTC] No.41909707[source]▶
It seems that often even Dracula is viewed as a "good bad book". Not high quality literature, but great to read.

I realise I've used vague terms in that sentence, even setting aside the tricky question of what makes the things often described as great works "greater" than things that are looked down on, but might be much more popular.

I once read a great foreword to a novel lamenting the loss of "good bad books", citing Dracula as an example. It was by a famous author (as I remember), but I can't remember, and can't find, the foreword or the novel I'm thinking of.

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inejge ◴[22 Oct 24 15:09 UTC] No.41915055[source]▶
I once read a great foreword to a novel lamenting the loss of "good bad books", citing Dracula as an example.

It's an article/essay by George Orwell (actually titled Good Bad Books), available online.

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1. red369 ◴[23 Oct 24 09:19 UTC] No.41923305[source]▶
Thanks - it is too! I saw that when searching, but dismissed it as not what i remembered. Your comment made me take a closer look.