Goth(ic) horror

Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in 1897, and reading it more than a century later, I wish I could step back in time to experience the story fresh and unique, as it was then. I struggle to keep an objective reader’s eye when images of Bela Lugosi or the Count from Sesame Street pop into my head.

Vampires existed in legend before Stoker brought them to life in his book, but the details today no longer have quite the power to impress: driving a stake through the vampire’s heart to “kill” it; holding a crucifix as a protective shield; watching a bat transform into a human form. All these things are part of everyday knowledge in a culture that has made Buffy a household name.

I am fascinated by the way that Stoker chose to tell his tale, in diaries and letters. I just finished the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a much lighter and more contemporary story, also told in letters. Writing in the epistolary form gives you the ability to shift POV without having to set the scene for your readers – the salutation or the diary entry is enough to clue readers to the switch. But it also requires careful consideration of how much each character should reveal in order to move the plot forward. Whatever happens must be told after the fact, so the drawback is a certain distancing from the action. But perhaps that was Stoker’s intent. The circumstances of the vampire story in the 1890s were so diabolical and gruesome that they needed the perspective of distance.

It's evident where J.K. Rowling drew some of the inspiration for her series. Dracula De Ville reminds me an awful lot of Harry Potter's arch nemesis, Voldemort, with his red eyes and soul of evil. His ability to shape-shift into animals – a bat, a dog – is similar to the Animagus transformations that some of Rowling’s wizards can effect. And Mina’s link to Dracula – that she can, under hypnosis, sense what the vampire is hearing or seeing – is quite like Potter’s uncanny link to the One Who Must Not Be Named. Not to mention, Voldemort hung out in the woods of Romania for a while after the Sorcerer's Stone (can you tell I've read Rowling's books a few times?).

Next up, I hope to reread Interview with a Vampire, a book I haven’t touched in 20 years. I’m curious to see how much vampire lore in that tale is linked to Stoker’s story and how much Anne Rice created.

(The image this with post is courtesy of Harry Boardman and his blog, 365 Monsters. Thanks, Harry!)

Carried away

War, sang Edwin Starr all those years ago, what is it good for? The song's answer: Absolutely nothing. And Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried makes that absolutely clear. How I missed O'Brien's book for so long – he wrote it in 1990 – I don't know, but it is astonishing.

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. ...
Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn't,
because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe
the truly incredible craziness.

The crystal clear images continue to reverberate days after I finished the last page. The young VC he killed. The pieces of a fellow soldier he had to remove from a tree after a land mine exploded. The death of his best buddy in a field of human waste. Chapter after chapter, incident after incident, O'Brien drew me – a person who has never been closer to battle than riding on a training flight with a KC-135 refueling plane – into the paddies and jungle paths of Vietnam. I was there with him as he tried to stay calm on a pitch-black patrol shift or waited impatiently for the medic to treat him after he was shot in the buttocks. Today's soldiers are all volunteers, people who choose to enlist. O'Brien almost left for Canada when he got his draft notice – he fled north to within a canoe ride from the border – but ultimately he obeyed the summons from Uncle Sam, then spent the next 20 years trying to exorcise the painful memories by writing about them.

Purely by chance, two days after I finished O'Brien's book I saw the film The Beautiful Country, which begins in Vietnam. It is a postwar tale about a young Vietnamese man's quest to find his father, who had been an American soldier stationed there. I marveled at the contrast between the grim reality of the war depicted in O'Brien's book and the serene beauty of the land itself. Binh's mixed-race background makes him a pariah in his home country, but the journey he sets out on seems one he can't possibly complete.