Book Event Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula A talk with author David J. Skal. Two days after Halloween we have an event to really get your teeth into. Book Overview: Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary Count Dracula, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in a psychological and cultural portrait, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as a boy, and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail. The book in more detail: A groundbreaking biography reveals the haunted origins of the man who created Dracula and traces the psychosexual contours of late Victorian society. First published in 1897, Dracula has had a long and multifaceted afterlifeone 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 borna time when death was no metaphor but a constant threat easily imagined as a character existing in flesh and blood.

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