Curated new collections. Dublin-born Bram Stoker lived in London, meeting other notable authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde. Apart from the ground-breaking Dracula Stoker wrote supernatural horror short stories, many of which, including ‘The Judge’s House’ and ‘Dracula’s Guest’, are featured here with extracts from his longer works.
String garlic by the window and hang a cross around your neck! The most powerful vampire of all time returns in our Stepping Stone Classic adaption of the original tale by Bran Stoker. Follow Johnathan Harker, Mina Harker, and Dr. Abraham van Helsing as they discover the true nature of evil. Their battle to destroy Count Dracula takes them from the crags of his castle to the streets of London... and back again.
Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage re-appraises Stoker's key fictions in relation to his working life. It takes Stoker's work from the margins to centre stage, exploring how Victorian theatre's melodramatic and Gothic productions influenced his writing and thinking.
Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. It introduced the character of Count Dracula, and established many conventions of subsequent vampire fantasy. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and a woman led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
Shortlisted for the Edgar Award (Critical/Biographical) Finalist for the Bram Stoker Award (Nonfiction) Finalist for the Anthony Award (Critical Nonfiction) A revelatory biography exhumes the haunted origins of the man behind the immortal myth, bringing us "the closest we can get to understanding [Bram Stoker] and his iconic tale" (The New Yorker). In this groundbreaking portrait of the man who birthed an undying cultural icon, David J. Skal "pulls back the curtain to reveal the author who dreamed up this vampire" (TIME magazine). Examining the myriad anxieties plaguing the Victorian fin de siecle, Skal stages Bram Stoker’s infirm childhood against a grisly tableau of medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that pervades Dracula. In later years, Stoker’s ambiguous sexuality is explored through his passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving, and his romantic rivalry with lifelong acquaintance Oscar Wilde—here portrayed as a stranger-than-fiction doppelgänger. Recalling the psychosexual contours of Stoker’s life and art in splendidly gothic detail, Something in the Blood is the definitive biography for years to come.
Evangelical Gothic explores the bitter antagonism that prevailed between two defining institutions of nineteenth-century Britain: Evangelicalism and the popular novel. Christopher Herbert begins by retrieving from near oblivion a rich anti-Evangelical polemical literature in which the great religious revival, often lauded in later scholarship as a "moral revolution," is depicted as an evil conspiracy centered on the attempted dismantling of the humanitarian moral culture of the nation. Examining foundational Evangelical writings by John Wesley and William Wilberforce alongside novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bram Stoker, and others, Herbert contends that the realistic popular novel of the time was constitutionally alien to Evangelical ideology and even, to some extent, took its opposition to that ideology as its core function. This provocative argument illuminates the frequent linkage of Evangelicalism in nineteenth-century fiction with the characteristic imagery of the Gothic–with black magic, with themes of demonic visitation and vampirism, and with a distinctive mood of hysteria and panic.
In a tale of ancient evil, Bram Stoker creates a world of lurking horrors and bizarre denizens: a demented mesmerist, hellbent on mentally crushing the girl he loves; a gigantic kite raised to rid the land of an unnatural infestation of birds, and which receives strange commands along its string; and all the while, the great white worm slithers below, seeking its next victim...
A fully updated edition of David J. Skal's Hollywood Gothic, "The ultimate book on Dracula" (Newsweek). The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David J. Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all. includes black-and-white Illustrations throughout, plus a new Introduction.
From a New York Times–bestselling author: A former spy is recruited to unmask a vampire hunter in this Locus Award Winner. James Asher, a retired member of the Queen’s secret service in Edwardian England, has settled into quietude as an Oxford professor of philology with his physician wife, Lydia. But his peace is shattered when he’s confronted by a pale aristocratic Spaniard named Don Simon Ysidro, who makes an outlandish claim that someone is killing his fellow vampires of London, and he needs James’s help to ferret the culprit out. The request also comes with a threatening ultimatum: Should James fail, both he and his wife will die. With James’s talent for espionage and Lydia’s scientific acumen and keen analytical mind, the couple begins an investigation that takes them from the crypts of London to the underworld circles of the unliving to the grisly depths of a charnel house in Paris. Now James and Lydia must believe in the unbelievable—if they’re to survive another night in the shadow of Don Simon Ysidro. This first book in the James Asher series is “one of the more memorable vampire novels of recent years—smoothly written, suspenseful, awash in moral ambiguity, and rich in vampire lore . . . a must-read for vampire fans” (Kirkus Reviews). Barbara Hambly gives “Anne Rice a run for her money” (Publishers Weekly) and “Don Simon is unforgettable” (Charlaine Harris). This ebook features an illustrated biography of Hambly, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from her personal collection.
