Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Tales (Penguin Classics)
by Bram Stoker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bram StokerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2007-02-27
ISBN: 0141441712
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Book Reviews of Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Tales (Penguin Classics)
Book Review: The ORIGINAL version of "Lair of the White Worm"!
Summary: 5 Stars
"Dracula's Guest" is an excellent short story collection by the author of "Dracula". It includes at least a couple of absolute horror classics, such as the title story, "The Judge's House", and "The Squaw". Another reviewer has ably summarized the stories and I have nothing further to add.
Regarding the novel "The Lair of the White Worm" (also included in this volume), I have been familiar with this extremely strange work for many years. Imagine my shock when I received this book, and learned that I had never actually read Stoker's novel at all! The version of LotWW that has been standard for most of a century was actually chopped to pieces and many parts RE-WRITTEN by some anonymous writer after Stoker's death. No wonder people have always found the novel to be badly put together.
Well, OK, it's STILL badly put together. It was written while Stoker was dying, possibly of syphilis, and taking some weird medications. It's still a very strange performance. But I much prefer it to the thing that has been out there for 80 years masquerading as Stoker's book. If you've ever read that bastardized version before and hated it, you should at least give Stoker's actual book a chance and buy this edition.
An example: One Amazon reviewer of a different edition of LotWW totally trashed the book, and gave a sample of its hilariously badly-written dialogue. Well, guess what - Stoker didn't write that particular bit of dialogue. It doesn't appear in this edition at all. (Although I'll grant you that there are still plenty of other examples of hilariously badly-written dialogue in the book.)
Another example: There is an utterly outrageous scene in this version that I loved, but which is missing from the "standard" edition. In it, our intrepid heroes, for no convincing or even intelligible reason, have accepted an invitation to afternoon tea from their neighbor, Lady Arabella March - even while knowing that said Lady is, in reality, a gigantic prehistoric snake in human form (!) who desires to destroy them all. Well, the nice little Edwardian tea-party starts off all right, until Lady Arabella becomes frustrated by the failure of her attempts to cause her guests to slip and fall into a well in the cellar of her house (which is, in reality, an entrance to her subterranean lair). So she transforms herself into her true (monstrous) shape on the spot and furiously chases our heroes half way across England. (The latter are aided in their escape by the sudden re-appearance of a gigantic flock of pigeons that seems to follow one of the characters around for some mysterious reason.) Our heroes finally board a ship at Liverpool (apparently pre-arranged in some way that's never explained), but continue to be pursued into the Irish Sea by Lady Arabella (now a sea-serpent) until she/it finally gives up the chase. The next day, all parties involved simply return to their homes as though nothing at all had happened - Lady Arabella, in fact, sends a polite letter to the main character asking for his help in a business matter, and he just as politely agrees to help her! This scene, like much of the book, is as jaw-droppingly surrealistic and disjointed as a dream - but it is also highly entertaining, like something from a Monty Python film. I found it to be very funny, but I still can't decide whether Stoker meant it to be funny or not (I sure hope he did).
So just what the heck IS this novel, anyway? A product of senile and/or drug-addled dementia? A protracted exercise in the bizarre and grotesque humor that Stoker showed himself capable of in his short story "The Dualitists" (not included in this volume)? A rough draft that never got finished due to Stoker's final illness but was published anyway, perhaps for financial reasons? A little of each, I suspect. But whatever else LotWW is, nobody can deny that it is truly unique, especially in its original form. I can absolutely guarantee that you have never read anything else even remotely like it before.
PS - Also be careful with Stoker's interesting mummy novel, "The Jewel of Seven Stars". Once again, some hack (the same one?) re-wrote the ending of that book and completely ruined it, while also chopping out one chapter. If you want to read what Bram Stoker actually wrote, you should get the new Penguin Classics version of that novel as well.
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