Dracula 1.0 From Gothic to Horror Fiction

It only seems fair after writing a post called Dracula 2.0 to write one in honor of Dracula 1.0. The version numbers aren't just for fun- Bram Stoker's Dracula founded pop culture's fascination with the vampire, and, according to the HWA, was the "seminal horror work." But Bram Stoker did not invent the vampire. Blood-sucking legend has a long folklore history, nor was Bram Stoker the first to introduce the legend in literary form. This honor is usually attributed to Carmila by Sheridan Le Fanu. Carmila heavily influenced Stoker's novel, and is not unlike the beta version of some great software that never gained the popularity of its 1.0 release candidate.

So why do kids dress up as Dracula instead of Carmila on Halloween? Why doesn't the HWA (Horror Writers Association) give out Le Fanu awards instead of the Stoker awards? The answer has to do with genre. Carmila is an example of Gothic fiction, not horror.

Gothic fiction is all about ambiance and spooky atmosphere. Gothic novels are often romances, in which a nubile young woman faces a supernatural threat that parallels the threat of her deflowering (think Jane Eyre). Gothic fiction is all about building a sense of dread, and the spooky is in the suspense, the heroine's fragility, and her grim surroundings.

The principle characteristic of horror fiction is shock. A head is severed by a chain saw, a psychopath sews a suit of human skin, a victim falls in vat of acid and we see him dissolve.

Horror is the child of Gothic fiction- horror borrows the build-up of suspense and dreadful atmosphere, then shows us the gruesome, physical details of the dreaded event. Bram Stoker's Dracula is honored as a seminal horror work because it built on the Gothic fiction elements of Le Fanu's Carmila and got down to the gritty physical details of vampirism. Gross scenes in Dracula include crude blood transfusions, eating insects and birds raw, cutting the head off a corpse. Dracula contains elements of both Gothic and horror fiction, which is one of the reasons I love it.

My interest in the horror genre leans more toward the creepy atmosphere and build-up of suspense than the gross-out. This is a purely personal preference, and it explains why I love Stephen King books like Needful Things, Insomnia, and Salem's Lot, but can't get past the first two pages of The Stand. The Stand begins with shocking gross-out events, the other King novels I mentioned begin with spooky atmosphere in small towns.

The horror genre runs on a spectrum from Gothic to shock- is your preference at one of he extremes or dead in the middle?

The Historian- Dracula 2.0

Since Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, thousands of stories, books, stage plays, films, and TV series have been based on his tale. Success in recapturing Stoker's magic varies wildly, from cheesy B flicks to imaginative reinventions of vampire lore such as Joss Whedon's Buffyverse. But I've only read one novel that comes close to the voyeuristic thrill of reading the letters and journal entries of Lucy, Mina, Johnathan, Dr. Seward- and that is The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Like Stoker, Kostova's tale is at once about powerful supernatural forces and the very personal lives disrupted by them. Kostova ups the drama of learning the story in scraps of journal entries, letters, and stories by scattering these sources through three distinct time lines. Further, Kostova develops the idea of epistolary storytelling by making the revelatory documents, themselves, magical. If you love libraries, the scent of old books, the thrill of unfolding a brittle, yellowed map, this book is for you.

It is interesting to note that The Historian, on the New York Times bestseller list in 2005, awarded the Book Sense Adult Fiction "Book of the Year" award in 2006, is actually set in 2008! In our near-future "present" a woman tells us the story of how her family was torn apart by Vlad Tepes (aka Dracula). Our narrator's part in the tale unfolds when she was a young woman in the early 1970's. The narrator is chasing after her father, who in turn is in pursuit of her long-lost mother. The narrator delves into events involving her father before her birth in the 1950's. Her 1950's history major father, in his turn, must go back in time to the 1930's to learn the fate of his mentor. And so, from generation to generation, the historians of the family are inducted, shaking with equal doses of fear and pique, into the knowledge of Dracula.

If, like me, you've ever spent a rainy day sunk deep in a library chair, rereading Bram Stoker's Dracula for one more delicious taste of his characters and his mastery of the art of suspense, then grab a copy of The Historian- it's Dracula 2.0, and a ton of fun for fans of Dracula.