Something in the Blood
The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula
Published on 4. October 2016
Book
Hardback
672 pages
978-1-63149-010-1 (ISBN)
Description
Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with "bad blood" that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelgaenger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.
Reviews / Votes
"He [David Skal] is surely successful in his efforts to revivify his subject and to reveal that even those shadows we think we know may contain obscurities that move of their own volition and which, tantalizingly, remain just out of sight." -- The Times Literary Supplement "...Skal's knowledge of the byways of literary and theatrical history is prodigious." -- The Sunday Times "...Skal's 'untold story' is an exercise in literary sleuthing, reading back from the fiction to uncover the motives of its making." -- Literary Review "... consistently entertaining, sumptuously illustrated ramble through Stokerism." -- John Sutherland - The Spectator "Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Most people don't know much more about him than that, so this hefty biography is to be welcomed... [it] makes many fascinating connections." -- The Irish Times "... highly digestible feast." -- SFX "David Skal's enormous, and enormously enjoyable, new biography of Stoker... is a vast and generously discursive work that has interesting and important things to say about almost every aspect of Stoker's life and work..." -- The WildeanMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Publishing group
WW Norton & Co
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
16 pages of color and 80 black-and-white illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 244 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 55 mm
Weight
1114 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-63149-010-1 (9781631490101)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
10/2016
Liveright
€20.49
Available for download
Person
David J. Skal was one of the world's preeminent authorities on Bram Stoker, Dracula, and monsters in popular culture. His book Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (Norton, 1990) was hailed as "the ultimate book on Dracula" by Newsweek; The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (Norton, 1993) has had multiple translations and is widely considered the standard historical and critical survey. As a filmmaker, he wrote, produced, and directed a dozen DVD and Blu-ray documentaries on Universal's classic horror and science fiction films, as well as a behind-the-scenes chronicle of the Academy Award-winning film Gods and Monsters. Skal guest-lectured extensively at major colleges, universities, and cultural organizations in North America and Europe, with speaking engagements at sites such as the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the Musee du Louvre. He additionally taught courses based on his books at the University of Victoria and Trinity College Dublin, where he was also appointed a Long Room Hub Visiting Research Fellow for Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker (Liveright, 2016), chosen by the Mystery Writers of America as a 2017 Edgar Award finalist for biography and criticism. His official website was monstershow.net.