ClimbingSky

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Dracula

  • Why We Read Horror

    I have been thinking a lot about why we love and read Ghost Stories, Horror Novels, etc. Here are a few ideas I have come up with: The Thrill of the Safe Scare or “Why fear feels good” Meeting the Monster Within or “How Horror is a mirror to the human psyche” Fear as Connection Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “Dracula’s Chair” by Peter Tremayne

    I came across Peter Temayne’s perfect Dracula short story “Dracula’s Chair” in a collection called Coffins: The Vampire Archives, edited by Otto Penzler. For a lover of Stoker’s Dracula, it is the perfect anthology. It contains stories by writers like Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch, and F. Paul Wilson. Tremayne’s short-story is about a writer who Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “Dracula’s Guest” by Bram Stoker

    “Dracula’s Guest” is a short story by Bram Stoker, first published posthumously in 1914 in the collection Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories.  It is widely believed to be an excised or early draft of the original opening chapter of Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula.  It is about a young, unidentified Englishman, en route to Transylvania, found Read more

  • SHORT STORY REVIEW: “Reconciliation Day” by Christopher Fowler

    “Reconciliation Day” is a stand-alone short story, written by Christopher Fowler, that is part of a series called Bibliomysteries: Short Tales About Deadly Books. Obsessed with the legendary “blue edition” of Dracula, a rare and supposedly altered version of Stoker’s classic rumored to contain a different ending and a chapter set in Dracula’s library, leading Read more

  • BOOK REVIEW: Stoker’s Manuscript by Royce Prouty

    The story of the writing and publication of Bram Stoker’s masterpiece, Dracula, in many ways is as interesting as most fiction. Here is at the basic information of the publication of Dracula: In Stoker’s Manuscript writer Royce Prouty takes the history of Stoker’s manuscript and reimagines its history. The plot of Stoker’s Manuscript centers on Read more

  • Victorian Technologies in Dracula

    On my rereading of the novel Dracula this year (that I posted about yesterday) one of the details that caught my attention was that Jonathan Harker references having a Kodak. This was a detail I had not noticed before. Since I was listening to an audiobook recording of Stoker’s classic, I double-checked when I got Read more

  • Dracula – A 2025 Check-in

    Another year and another rereading of Dracula. This year my rereading amounted to listening to an excellent, unabridged audiobook version of Stoker’s classic I had not listened to before, an 18-hour, 25-minute version of Dracula featuring Patricia Alison, Rachel Atkins, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Jason Forbes, Theo James, Harry Myers, Himish Patel, Jason Watkins, and Richard Reed. Read more

  • On the Art of Rereading

    “Rereading, not reading, is what counts,” ~ Jorge Luis Borges.  “When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before,” ~ Cliff Fadiman.  ““If a book isn’t worth reading over and over again, it isn’t worth reading at all.” ~ Read more

  • Powers of Darkness by Bram Stoker & Valdimar Ásmundsson

    In 2017, right after it was published, I read the book Powers of Darkness. Powers of Darkness is a Icelandic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1899. It was published anonymously in a newspaper and credited to Stoker and an unidentified author. While it shares the same main character, it differs significantly from the original, adding new characters Read more

  • Dracula by Bram Stoker

    Dracula is one of those books that everyone knows but few probably actually read much anymore. The details of Castle Dracula, Transylvania, Count Dracula, bats, wolves, sleeping in a coffin, casting no reflection in a mirror, fear of garlic and crucifixes, stakes through the heart, and all the others vampire cliches are well known. They Read more