Horror: The 100 Best Books by Kim Newman, Stephen Jones Page A

accounts, journals, newspaper clippings and documents -- Dracula is probably the first modern horror novel. In its conflict between an ancient evil and the modern world, it sets the precedent for the entire 20th-century development of the form. It has been adapted for stage, film, television, comic books and radio countless times, and several hands -- including those of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Peter Tremayne, Fred Saberhagen, Manly Wade Wellman, Woody Allen, and Ramsey Campbell -- have produced sequels.
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    Dracula is a paradoxical masterpiece, a work that, in a sense, has no right to exist. Stoker's other fantasy novels -- The Lady of the Shroud , The Lair of the White Worm and The Jewel of Seven Stars -- reveal a depressing lack of literary talent; they are crude and obvious. Yet Dracula is one of the most remarkable classics in the whole realm of horror fiction. When I reviewed Harry Ludlum's biography of Bram Stoker in 1962, I received a long letter from a highly literate old gentleman who told me that I had done less than justice to Dracula ; he had read it a dozen times, and felt that, as a novel, it had quite simply everything: excitement, romance, sympathy, warmth, horror, adventure . . . And when I re-read the novel in the light of the old gentleman's letter, I saw he was right. From those opening words in Jonathan Harker's journal: "3 May. Bistritz. -- Left Munich at 8.35p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning . . .", it grips the attention. You feel you are in the hands of a man who knows what he is talking about. And the talk about the British Museum, the study of maps of Transylvania, the slightly pedantic description of the races of this part of central Europe, impart a richness of texture that fills the reader with the feeling a child experiences when someone says "Once upon a time . . ." Harry Ludlum's biography reveals that Abraham Stoker himself was hardly the sort of person one might expect to produce a masterpiece. The son of a Dublin clerk, he seemed in his twenties destined for a career in the Civil Service. In childhood he had been sickly and introverted, and dreamed of becoming a writer. At the age of twenty he discovered the works of Walt Whitman, and went to the other extreme, becoming a muscular, healthy and apparently completely normal young man. Deeply impressed by the actor Henry Irving when the latter came to Dublin, Stoker became an unpaid theatre critic simply for the satisfaction of praising his idol; as a result, he and Irving became friends, and in 1878, Irving asked him to become his general manager. Stoker accepted immediately, and neither ever had reason to regret the decision. Stoker worked like a dray horse for his brilliant but slightly crazy employer, answering fifty letters a day, reading plays and engaging actors. But he made no attempt to use his new position to lead a Bohemian life; he remained a stodgily married man, one of those bearded late Victorians who always looks at life from a loftily moral viewpoint -- in one of his articles, Stoker even advocated the censorship of fiction. Considering the mad pace of his daily life -- his death certificate gave the cause of death as "exhaustion" [an Edwardian doctor's euphamism for syphilis (ed.)] -- it is a mystery how he found time to write books, let alone a masterpiece like Dracula . The novel emphasizes the importance of allowing oneself to be totally gripped by a subject before starting to write about it. One evening in 1890, at a midnight supper, he met a remarkable man named Arminus Vambery, a professor of Oriental languages from Budapest, who knew twenty languages and was a student of the occult. Vambery told him about the 15th-century ruler of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler, so named because he enjoyed having people he disliked impaled alive on pointed poles in his dining room. (Any guests who looked sick were in danger of being impaled on another pole.) It may have been after that first meeting with Vambery that