First published in 1897, Dracula has had a long and multifaceted
afterlife--one rivaling even its immortal creation; yet Bram Stoker has
remained a hovering specter in this pervasive mythology. In Something
in the Blood, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius
of the writer who birthed an undying cultural icon, painting an
astonishing portrait of the age in which Stoker was born--a time when
death was no metaphor but a constant threat easily imagined as a
character existing in flesh and blood.
Just as in his celebrated histories The Monster Show and Hollywood
Gothic, Skal draws on a wealth of newly discovered documents with the
skills of a fine detective (New York Times Book Review) to challenge
much of our accepted wisdom about Dracula, Stoker, and the late
Victorian age. Staging Stoker's life against a grisly tableau of the
myriad anxieties plaguing the Victorian fin de siecle, Skal investigates
Stoker's transgendered imagination, unearthing Stoker's unpublished,
sexually ambiguous poetry and his passionate youthful correspondence
with Walt Whitman--printed in full here for the very first time.
Born into a middle-class Protestant family in Dublin in Black 47--the
year the potato famine swept the country--Stoker was inexplicably
paralyzed as a boy, and his early years unfold alongside a parade of
Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and typhus, frantic
bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad
blood" that colors Dracula. While destined to become best known for
his legendary undead count, Bram Stoker would become a prolific writer,
critic, and theater producer, rubbing shoulders with Henry Irving, Hall
Caine, and Lady Jane Wilde and her salon set--including her
fated-to-be-infamous son Oscar.
In this probing psychological and cultural portrait of the man who
brought us one of the most memorable monsters in history, Skal reveals a
lifetime spent wrestling with the greatest questions of an era--a time
riddled by disease, competing attitudes toward sex and gender, and
unprecedented scientific innovation accompanied by rising paranoia and
crises of faith. Stoker's battle resulted in a resilient modern folktale
that continues to shock and enthrall; perhaps the most frightening thing
about Dracula, Skal writes, is the strong probability that it meant
far less to Bram Stoker than it has come to mean to us.
