This just might be

    your daddy’s

         vampire story…

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in London 125 years ago. If you haven’t read it yet, you still have time. Since Bela Lugosi starred in the 1931 film version and revived the popularity of the Victorian novel, it has never been out of print.

By any reckoning, this a scary book. Count Dracula is a very bad boy, and Van Helsing and Harker and the others dashingly pursue him to Transylvania to put him down. Distinctly gothic, pulsating action, vampire stuff ‘til you choke on it. Dracula a lot better than a car chase through the streets of San Francisco. It’s much more literary and much more high-toned and much more realistic than Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Dracula is less surreal and more gritty than Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

Some folks think Stoker modeled his protagonist on the 15th century Romanian Prince Vlad III (“Vlad the Impaler”), whose family name was Dracula (“dragon” or “devil”). Modern critics say it’s not so. Stoker is known to have noticed the name “Dracula” in his reading, and he chose it for the character he had initially named “Count Wampyr.”

Soon after the book appeared, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) sent this note to Stoker: “I write to tell you how very much I have enjoyed reading Dracula. I think it is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years.”

Just so.

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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2017 All rights reserved.

A glimpse of the millennial dawn…

witness to the song of the sea…(a poem)

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​Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,

and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)

and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”

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Book review: Iron Tears

Did the British really try to win?

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