Free Fiction Friday: A Dream Of Dracula

For this week’s Free Fiction Friday selection we have to take a trip in our time machine back to the year 1972 for A Dream Of Dracula by Leonard Wolf. This is a non-fiction book that tells the history of the character Dracula. The book starts off by talking about the historic figures that inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula, such as Romanian ruler Vlad the Impaler and Baron Gilles de Rais who was a French serial killer with a taste for blood.

From there the book talks about the books that inspired Dracula including Mathew G. Lewis’s The Monk and John Polidori’s The Vampyre: A Tale. It also gives a detailed biography on Bram Stoker and talks about his writing process for Dracula. There are even chapters in this book that cover all the plays and movies that were based on Dracula.

When Leonard Wolf wrote A Dream of Dracula, he was working as a creative writing professor at San Francisco State University. He was born in Romania (home of Dracula) and always had an interest in classic horror literature. He went on to write non-fiction books on Frankenstein, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Phantom of the Opera. He has also written several books researching mythological beasts.

A Dream of Dracula was a labor of love and gives a very detailed description of a cultural phenomenon. If you would like your own copy of this book and you live in the United States, just leave a comment on this blog post and let us know why you want to adopt this book. The best comment gets a copy of A Dream of Dracula. Good Luck!

Free Fiction Friday:Dracula Unbound

This Week’s Free Fiction Friday selection is Dracula Unbound by Brian Wilson Aldiss. This book was originally released in 1990. The story is that Count Dracula has a time machine that is in the form of a train. He wants to make sure that Bram Stoker never writes his novel Dracula so he sends a group of vampire assassins to the year 1896 to kill Stoker.  Things don’t go well for the vampires, a man named Joe Bodenland hijacks the train and finds Bram Stoker. The two now plan to use the train to destroy all vampires.

Brian Wilson Aldiss is generally a science fiction writer. He is from England and was heavily influenced by H.G. Wells. He is vice president of the international H.G. Wells Society, co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group and has also won two Hugo awards and one Nebula award. Some of the other books Brain has written include: Courageous New Planet, Ruins and Sanity and the Lady. He also wrote Super Toys Last All Summer Long which was the basis for Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film A.I.

The reviews I’ve read for this book say its an entertaining read but the story is a little far fetched. They also say the depiction of Bram Stoker is the best part. Another interesting item brought up in this book is that vampires are descendants of pterodactyls, have mastered time travel and want to use it to enslave the human race.

So if you want to read a tale about time traveling vampires and find out more about Bram Stoker traveling through time to destroy vampires, then this is the book for you. If you are a U.S. resident, leave a comment on the end of this post and let us know why you would be a good owner for this book. The best comment gets a copy of Dracula Unbound.

1980′s Horror Books

The first book I want to look at for the 1980s is Blood of the Impaler by Jeffrey Sackett. This book was released in 1989 and is a sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it follows a twenty something bartender named Malcom Harker who is the great grandson of Jonathan and Mina Harker.  Malcom  hates going out in the day and only feels good at night, he soon finds out that he has Dracula’s blood running through his veins from when Mina was forced to suck Dracula’s blood.  The Harkers are cursed and the only thing to stop the curse is  to find Dracula’s ashes and spread them outside the vampire’s native land.

Its been several years since I’ve read Blood of The Impaler but I remember it was good enough where I found some of the other books that Jefferey Sackett wrote. Jefferey on all his books mixes history and horror. In Blood of the Impaler, he goes back and takes an in depth look at the real Vlad the impaler by having Dracula recount his own past from his childhood, to when he became ruler of Wallachia, to when he became a vampire, to his death in the book Dracula. The book also includes more diary enteries from the characters in Dracula and actually reads like Bram Stoker’s novel in places.

Blood of the Impaler gives a history lesson on the real Dracula but a lot of it also takes place in the present day. It offers up some interesting characters, some good death scenes, as well as a great battle between good and evil towards the end. This book may be hard to find now but if you enjoyed Bram Stoker’s Dracula and want to know about the vampire’s past as well as what happened to the other characters in Dracula after the end of the 1897 novel, you may want to find it.

The next book I want to mention came out in 1988 called Quarrel With The Moon by J.C. Conaway. The story follows an anthropologist who has uncovered some bones in West Virginia that look like they might be the remains of a werewolf. While investigating he also finds that the mountains are home to a clan of hillbilly werewolves who terrorize the back woods of West Virginia when the moon is full.

Also from 1988 we have Monastery by Patrick Whalen. This is a vampire tale that focuses on a couple of vampires that were trapped by the Catholic church under a Monastery located  an island 100 years ago. Two sociologists buy the Monastery and accidentally free the vampires setting the blood thirsty creatures free to feed on the innocent island residents. Luckily there is a hitman living on the island that may be able to put an end to the vampire menace. Most of the reviews for Monastery we’re positive calling the vampires true evil villains and the hero as larger then life. It was followed by a sequel called Night Thirst in 1991.

After I had finished and posted my article on 1970′s books, I was disappointed with myself because I realized that I forgot to mention one of my favorite 1970′s books: Demon Seed written by Dean Koontz in 1973. So I decided to make up for it by mentioning another great Dean Koontz book written in 1980 called The Funhouse. Ellen ran away from home one night and joined up with a traveling carnival, she eventually married the man who runs the carnival and they had a deformed child. Ellen killed the child and ran away. She now has a new family but the carnival is coming to town and her ex-husband wants to do to her children what she did to his.

When I read The Funhouse I noticed that when I got towards the end, the story seemed very familiar. When I was done I found out that the book was originally written under a pseudo name and was the novelization for the movie The Funhouse which was released in 1981 and directed by Tobe Hooper. Dean Koontz had written most of the novel before he saw the movie and only the last part of the book resembles the film. So if you have seen the movie and didn’t like it don’t let it stop you from reading the book.

I thought The Funhouse was a fun read filled with characters that have a lot of depth to them. I ended up feeling sorry for the carnival barker even though he is presented as the villain and the carnival barker’s second deformed child is much scarier in the book then the movie. The book also contains many gruesome death scenes and a great chase scene between the kids at the carnival and the people running the carnival. The Funhouse is a battle versus good and evil but what makes it an interesting book is all the shades of grey in the characters. At times you wonder who the villain really is and you see that sometimes there is a very thin line between good and evil.

The 1980′s was the golden age for horror novels, so do have a favorite 1980′s horror novel? Leave a comment on the blog and let us know.

1970′s books

When I was looking for horror books for the seventies it didn’t take long for me to come up with a list of books to talk about. The seventies and eighties were a great time for horror novels.  One of the most intriguing books I found was one written in 1972 called The Werewolf vs. Vampire Women by Arthur N Scram. This book is supposed to be an adaptation of a movie that was released  under the same name in 1971 but according to what I read, the book doesn’t follow the movie.  The book begins in a morgue where a  man called Waldo who happens to be a werewolf  is lying in a morgue on a table with a  silver bullet in him. The mortician removes the bullet and Waldo springs to life killing the mortician. Waldo the werewolf then goes out into the world and finds two female med students who are doing a masters thesis on a vampire queen named Wandessa de Nadasdy. Waldo hates vampires so he decides with the help of the female med students that he his going to find this queen and kill her. This books sound just corny enough to be entertaining.

Another book I wanted to mention was written in 1979 called The Majorettes by John Russo who was one of the co writers of Night Of The Living Dead.  This book was written at the same time that slasher movies were becoming popular. The story begins when  high school nerd Tommy Harvack who has a crush on a majorette named Nicole Hendricks, goes to meet her in the woods. Unfortunately for them they get murdered while on the rendezvous. The killer is not stopping there though, he has his sites set on killing the whole majorette squad. Can the police stop him in time? The Majorettes was originally meant to be a movie but when Russo could not get funding for it, he made it into a novel instead. A movie was finally released based on The Majorettes in 1987.

The 1970s also brought us a comic book that ran from 1972 to 1979 called Tomb of Dracula. This title was published by Marvel Comics, it was written by Marv Wolfman, drawn be Gene Colan and inked by Tom Palmer. The story for Tomb of Dracula was that Dracula was revived in the present day 1970’s and is being hunted by the decedents of the vampire hunters that once killed him. Tomb of Dracula also marked the first appearance of Blade who had his own comic series, TV series and three movies.

If your going to talk about books of the 1970′s you have to to mention the biggest horror author of all, Stephen King. King’s first novel was released in 1974 called Carrie. Carrie as you probably know tells the story of a shy girl in high school who discovers that she has telekinetic powers and uses them to take revenge on the  classmates that made fun of her.

My favorite Stephen King novel was his second novel which was released in 1975 called Salem’s Lot. Salem’s Lot follows the story of a man named Ben Mears who grew up in Salem’s Lot Massachusetts. He moved away when he was 12 but has now returned to find the town a very different place. The streets are deserted in the daytime, the town has been infected by vampires and only a few town residents are left to stop the vampires from taking over. I don’t feel that I have to say to much about Salem’s Lot here because most people reading this blog probably at least know the story from the 1979 mini series or the 2004 mini series which followed the book closely. Salem’s lot was heavily influenced by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House which was recently mentioned in this blog.

Sticking with the subject of vampires, I feel I also need to mention Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire which was written in 1973 and released in 1976. The story for Interview With A Vampire follows Louis as he tells the story of his life over the last 200 years. Interview With The Vampire spawned 11 sequels that I know of and also had a movie made on it in 1994.

What’s your favorite 1970′s horror novel? Leave a comment and let us know.

1930′s Horror Flicks!

The Ghoul is a 1933 British Horror film starring Boris Karloff as THE GHOUL!

What’s interesting is that after it’s release, it disappeared and was considered to be a lost film. The current copy that we all watched was found in the early 1980′s, in a forgotten film vault at Shepperton Studios. The vault was cleared and inside — the dormant nitrate camera negative in perfect condition. The film was kinda like The Ghoul in the film, kept in a sarcophagi, until after death, when it awoke! The film didn’t kill anyone that we know about, but the image of The Ghoul will stay with anyone who watches it.

This is one of those classic tales— the Egyptian curse, those that don’t believe, those that do and suddenly… the monster rises from the tomb to attack everyone! What I loved most about the movie was the huge mansion all dark and looming with Egyptian carvings casting interesting shapes on the walls. It really gave it a spooky sense of appeal.

Another movie of the era, Dracula, had the same sort of foreboding sets. Dracula is my all time favorite horror classic.

Here’s what David had to say about it:
Dracula was released on February 14th 1931 and was directed by Tod Browning and starred Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing, and Dwight Frye as Renfield.

The story begins with a stage coach riding through the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe, carrying Renfield to Castle Dracula to meet with the count to talk about property he is buying in England. Dracula feeds on Renfield and turns him into a slave and then heads off on a ship to London where he meets Lucy Weston and turns her into a vampire. Dracula then turns his sights on Mina, but before he can turn her Dr. Van Helsing and Mina’s fiancé, John Harker, discover that he is a vampire and try to stop him before it’s too late.

Dracula is not one of the best movies of all time but Bela Lugosi gives a great performance that makes this movie a classic.

What do you think about these two films? What is your favorite 1930’s horror flick?

Classic Horror novels

With the topic for episode 54 of Horror Addicts being classic horror. It would be easy to just mention Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or maybe Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft. I thought it would be more fun to find some lesser known classics. If your willing to look for them you will find these for free online.

One book I found was Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood by James Malcom Rymer. Though in some places the author for Varney the Vampire was given as Thomas Preskett Prest. Both James and Thomas wrote several books in the mid 1800’s and they introduced the world to Sweeney Todd in a book called The String of Pearls in 1847.

The Feast of Blood was a serialized gothic horror story which was released in a series of penny dreadfuls between 1845 and 1847. The story is about a vampire named Varney and the troubles he brings to a family called the Bannerworths.  As the story moves along Varney is shown as a sympathetic character. He was cursed to be a vampire after accidentally killing his son in a fit of anger. He is either killed or commits suicide several times in the book but always comes back to life and is doomed to feed on the blood of  the living for eternity.

Varney The Vampire was published as a book in 1847 and totals about 667,000 words. Varney was a major influence on vampire fiction, he has fangs, hypnotic powers and super human strength but he is able to walk in daylight and is not afraid of crosses. This book is one of the inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Another book that inspired Dracula is The Vampyre by John William Polidori. This story was written during the same period as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Authors Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, John Polidori, Claire Clairmont and Percy Shelley were staying at the Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816. It was rainy and to pass the time the five of them wrote stories.

This book was released in 1819, the story revolves around a young Englishman named Aubrey who meets a man named Lord Ruthven. Aubrey soon realizes that everywhere Lord Ruthven goes people end up mysteriously dying. Lord Ruthven is not a traditional vampire but several comparisons can be made between Lord Ruthven and Count Dracula.

A third book I found was The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. This is a book from 1898 about a haunted house in England. The story follows a boy named Miles who was just expelled from a boarding school. When he returns home he brings along two ghosts that terrorize Miles and the rest of the people that live in the house.

Some other books I found was The Book of Were-wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould This book contains several old myths and short stories that pertain to shape shifters. This book may not be a traditional classic but its all older stories about werewolves and I love werewolves so I wanted to include it here.

The last book I wanted to mention was Brood of the Witch Queen by Sax Rohmer. The story follows a man named Dr. Bruce Cairn who is using mind control to get people to kill for him. This pulp novel was written in 1918 by the same author who created Dr. Fu Manchu.