In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

In a further effort to clear the review slate, here are the books which I read in 2020 but haven't reviewed and am clearly now not going to.


9. Ali Riza Seyfioğlu (1928), Kazıklı Voyvoda / Dracula in Istanbul, trans Necip Ateş (2017) - like the Swedish and Icelandic versions, this is a bootleg of Stoker's Dracula, published within Florence Stoker's lifetime, but quite clearly without her knowledge, and is the source text for the film Drakula İstanbul'da (1953; LJ / DW). I think what I like about it best is that because it was written from a Turkish perspective and the Turks know all about the Impaler Prince who gave Mehmed II a kicking, Dracula in this version absolutely is Vlad Dracula the Wallachian voivode, or Kazıklı Bey as the Turks called him, with no ambiguity about it.

10. Michele Slung (1993), Shudder Again - bought for the story 'When The Red Storm Comes' by Sarah Smith, which is about a young woman living in a seaside town shortly before the First World War who is made into a vampire by a dashing gentleman who shows her visions of the approaching future calamity from which she will now be safe. It was OK, but not quite as 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' as I'd hoped when I heard it described at a conference. The rest is a mixed collection of short stories from different eras, all broadly horror but ranging between serial killers, gothic horrors, and the generally disturbing, with a central theme of being in some way about the relationship between sex and death. One was Robert Aickman's 'Ravissante', about a painter's surreal visit to the home of a Belgian symbolist painter's elderly wife which is probably all a big metaphor for the narrator's subconscious and has a framing device as a found document.

11. Anonymous author for Galley Press (1981), The Dracula Collection - basically a collection of fairly low-rent vampire images, including the one of Louis de Pointe du Lac holding a candelabra used for the cover of the edition of Interview with the Vampire which I have, and strung together with a narrative about Dracula showing a curious human visitor to his castle around his family portrait gallery. But the framing narrative includes some great scenes where the narrator has to imbibe strange substances, enter into and travel through another dimension in order to reach Dracula's castle. A surprisingly compelling fantastical narrative for something I had zero expectations of, and which my friend S had found for me in a charity shop.

After reading Peter Tremayne's Dracula Unborn (LJ / DW), I decided it was finally time to read the book which had inspired it, and so many others like it, in the first place. I read Florescu and McNally's Dracula, Prince of Many Faces, which focuses on the historical Dracula, three years ago (LJ / DW), and for a long time have felt that I didn't really need to bother with this one, given that I've also already read multiple debunkings of it. But, given what a big impact it has had on Dracula-related fiction, I felt in the end that I needed to know for myself what had and hadn't come from here. As the title of my post shows, I read it in the updated and revised 1994 edition rather than the original 1972 version, but I think it is good enough. The authors did not revise their central thesis between the two, and indeed restate it proudly and enthusiastically in the updated edition, though the preface also lists various new sources of evidence which they consulted.

I was basically right that it's both poor literary analysis and poor history. A lot of statements about what Stoker knew about the historical Dracula are pure assertion or speculation. Phrases such as 'It is likely Stoker heard the legends connecting Dracula to this region' (Bistrița) abound. And much of the information about the historical Dracula is completely unreferenced, which is hopeless when the primary sources for him are so contentious. They need not just referencing but constant direct engagement and discussion to get anywhere. McNally and Florescu are sometimes capable of doing that, but not consistently enough, and in particular they seem to have a complete blind spot when it comes to Romanian oral folklore. They treat this a reliable source which can be used to 'confirm' stories from the manuscripts and printed pamphlets, without considering that the folklore legends may stem from people reading the same sources centuries ago. Regarding the location of Dracula's supposed grave at Snagov, they even literally say 'We are inclined to accept the idea that the actual grave was the one near the altar, the one sanctioned by local folklore - always a useful guide in resolving enigmas associated with Dracula' (pp. 113-4). No. You cannot do that. Oral history is just not a reliable source over those timescales.

I was right that this was where Peter Tremayne got the idea about a second castle in the Argeș valley, but this is one of the claims which McNally and Florescu only really have oral tradition to support. According to them, local tradition in the area of Poenari castle claims that the name 'Poenari' originally referred to an older castle on the opposite side of the river from the one visible today (pp. 66-67). They say that the older castle stood on the site of a Roman-era fortress, and that its stones and bricks were used by Dracula to rebuild the castle on the other side of the Argeș now called Poenari. But they can't show any evidence of the older castle's existence - all they say to support it is that they were told about the remains of a low-lying wall at the bottom of the hill which might have formed part of its defences, and shown re-used stones in the local church and chimney-stacks and Dacian-period artefacts in the museum. There are no pictures even of any of these reused stones and artefacts, so it's basically pure hearsay, and they don't even claim to have seen the supposed low-lying wall themselves - only been told about it.

They are similarly vague and even self-contradictory about supposed underground passageways leading from the castle which is now called Poenari and out into the Argeș valley. The reality is that no such passageways are now identifiable, but they are convinced they must have existed nonetheless, because local oral tradition speaks of Dracula escaping from the castle that way in the context of a Turkish attack. So the tunnel is described on that basis (p. 72), and they also say that a visitor in 1912 reported seeing remains of the sunken passageway before the castle was damaged by an earthquake (p. 75), but don't say anything about who this visitor was or quote their account. As for who built it, they describe a winding staircase at Bran leading from a hidden stone covering next to the well in the main courtyard and out onto the knoll on which it stands, and assert that Dracula was so impressed by this that he installed something similar at 'his castle on the Argeș' (pp. 63-64). But, just a few pages later (p. 68), they claim that at the end of the fourteenth century, a Wallachian prince and his supporters retreated from the Tartars to the same castle, and when the Tartars stormed it they found nobody there, because the prince and his retinue had fled through secret passageways to the banks of the river. That story can only be true if there were already secret underground passageways at the castle half a century before Dracula's time, meaning that he had no need to install them himself.

Most of the book is like that. Much of the information in it seems interesting, but it crumbles on closer examination, just leaving you feeling irritated that you bothered in the first place. That said, I did notice for the first time thanks to this book that the St Gall manuscript about Dracula, a translation of which it contains, compares him directly to Herod, Nero, Diocletian and other persecutors of Christians. That's interesting, because I've been working on a theory for a while that quite a lot of the contents of the 'horror stories' which circulated about him is actually drawn from existing traditions about other tyrannical monarchs, and that sort of direct comparison confirms that at least some of the writers knew what tradition they were writing in. I also learnt from this book that one of the best-known portraits of Dracula comes from a collection at Ambras Castle in Austria specifically put together as a collection of curiosities by Ferdinand II, Archduke of Tyrol, which also includes the well-known portrait of the so-called wolf-man, Petrus Gonsalvus and his children. I knew it was called the 'Ambras portrait', but wasn't aware of that wider context, which is of course very typical of how almost every aspect of Dracula and his story has been perpetuated over the centuries. The castle, and Innsbruck where it is located, both look lovely, so I must try and go there some time once that sort of thing is possible again.

This is a collection of short stories whose author is known in this parish as sovay. I hope she won't mind if I proceed to just call her S for the rest of this review, a) to save myself having to keep typing out the code for sovay, and b) to signal that I'm writing about her in a different way here anyway, which bridges both sovay, the DW friend, and Sonya Taaffe, the author.

We've been DW friends for a few years now (probably about four-ish?), and I have been following S's writing career all that time. It is obviously a big passion and a serious commitment for her - she regularly posts to say that she has had an individual short story or poem published, attends readings and cons to present / talk about her work (in pre-COVID times anyway), and of course reported the publication of this book a couple of years ago. I've been a little slow to get round to acquiring and reading it, but not because I had any doubt that it would be good. I'd already read a couple of the individual stories in it anyway which S had shared, and been extremely impressed. I'm just slow, is all.

I've never met S in real life, as she lives in Boston, but she tells her DW readers a lot about herself, and has clearly put a lot of the same self into her stories too. So I had very much the same experience reading this book as I did when reading my friend Andrew Hickey's novel Head of State (LJ / DW) of recognising the person I know through DW in the stories. S's passion for the sea, knowledge of Classical myth and literature, Jewish heritage, and queer identity are all here, combined with a fine-detail observation of urban landscapes and a sense of colour and the best words for conveying it vividly which really struck me in the first of her stories that I read.

I'm not going to write about every single story, because there are twenty-two in the book altogether, but ( here are some notes on my favourites ones and what I liked about them )

In short, a very impressive and enjoyable collection which I highly recommend. S has a real gift for taking established literature, myth and history, combining it with close observation and transforming it into something completely new and unexpected. Here's to her further success as a writer.

This is the second book I read for the now-unlikely-to-happen DracSoc trip to Bath, again because its author lived there in the early to mid '70s. On one level it is a series of ten 'takes' on traditional fairy-tales, but even to say that rather over-simplifies and understates what Carter does with them. Most are entirely recast, reset, reframed - more riffs on the original stories than even retellings, and sometimes taking two or three iterations to explore different angles on the same archetype. All of them reflect her famously radical feminist perspective, but while that might now conjure up a vision of stories about women triumphing over patriarchy, perhaps with a queer emphasis, Carter's focus is more on demonstrating the workings of patriarchy, the ways in which women are often complicit in it, its damaging effects and (sometimes) the ways in which women can counter or escape from it. Most of the stories are also distinctly Gothic in nature, involving violence, the monstrous, isolated fantastical settings and a general sense of heightened drama and emotion. ( My notes on individual stories follow below )

So here I am with a weekend to myself for the first time in ages, but that isn't for good reasons, and it will probably be the first of far too many - if we're all lucky. I could sit here and write about the coronavirus, but for the sake of normality and mental health, here is a post about some ghost stories I read instead.

I started reading this collection a day or two before Christmas 2019, but I didn't finish it until after New Year 2020, so I'll count it as the first book of 2020. I have only knowingly read one Algernon Blackwood story before, which was The Willows, though I read a lot of horror short story compilations in my teens, so may well have read others. Anyway, I love The Willows, and what I love about it is that the scary supernatural entities in it are not ghosts or monsters in anything like the normal sense, but elemental forces or beings, seemingly from another dimension, which the human characters cannot see or understand. That really spoke to me and made for an immensely gripping and powerful story, so having read and enjoyed that one recently in isolation, I decided to make this, Algernon Blackwood's earliest published short story collection, the subject of this year's ghostly Christmas reading.

The table of contents runs thus:

The Empty House
A Haunted Island
A Case Of Eavesdropping
Keeping His Promise
With Intent To Steal
The Wood Of The Dead
Smith: An Episode In A Lodging-House
A Suspicious Gift
The Strange Adventures Of A Private Secretary In New York
Skeleton Lake: An Episode In Camp

Precis of all the stories (and more) may be found here, while the whole collection is online here. Some, such as The Empty House, A Case Of Eavesdropping and Keeping His Promise are standard-to-fairly standard ghost stories, though certainly very well done and typically leaving me feeling pleasantly on edge and unwilling to look behind me by the time I had finished them and was ready to turn out the light. But others reflect ( the same interest in the unknowable, the occult or the divine as The Willows )

Blackwood's interest in stories of this kind seems to be grounded in ( his real-world interests )

Two stories also place a significant emphasis on ( the act of story-telling itself )

Finally, again in line with the last Stoker novel I read and because it very much needs to be acknowledged, ( there is some full-blown racism in this collection too )