Justin Beplate
Coming out of the Coffin
Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula
By David J Skal
Liveright 652pp £25 order from our bookshop
It must be difficult for biographers of Bram Stoker to reconcile the fantastic excesses of his fictional writing with the prosaic and meagre biographical material found in his surviving letters and journal entries. Stoker the public man was a prolific correspondent and cataloguer of the minutiae of everyday life, yet there is precious little evidence of him ever confiding his innermost thoughts to paper. As David J Skal admits in his introduction to Something in the Blood, his subject left almost nothing in the way of candid or personal writings and ‘no real accounting of his life’. Even the publication of Stoker’s Lost Journal in 2012, released to coincide with the centenary of his death, did little to reveal the secret springs of his creative life, conveying instead a disappointingly impersonal grab bag of callow sketches and poetic musings.
The Lost Journal aside, it is safe to say that relatively little in the way of new biographical material on Stoker has surfaced since the publication of Barbara Belford’s Bram Stoker in 1997. Yet the corpus of academic writing on vampires has continued to swell like the bloated body
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'It is the ... sketches of the local and the overlooked that lend this book its density and drive, and emphasise Britain’s mostly low-key riches – if only you can be bothered to buy an anorak and seek.'
Jonathan Meades on the beauty of brutalism.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/castles-of-concrete
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma