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Digging Up the Truth About Bram Stoker The Forgotten Writings of Bram Stoker. Edited by John Edgar Browning. Foreword by Elizabeth Miller. Afterword by Dacre Stoker. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 288p. HB, $30.
ABOUT ONCE A YEAR, I reread Dracula, an act which, were I to stop with that book alone, would make its author, Bram Stoker, disheartened, I suspect. A tick more than 100 years after Stoker's death, Dracula endures for a host of reasons: the visage of terror at the core of its narrative, the scope of its plot, and its mélange of styles. Romance, mystery, potboiler, penny dreadful, medical casebook, travelogue, it all goes into the soup of Stoker's most famous work in a way that is, we would believe, dissimilar from the rest of his writings, which have failed to gain Dracula's eternal life. Stoker would have insisted that this perception should not be the case, that he was not some "one -hit wonder," a literary version of one of those bands whose name you can't remember who nonetheless has its lone chart-topper play on the oldies station constantly.
Dracula remains ubiquitous and has gone into enough sundry forms since its 1897 publication that many a Twilight buff has probably never even heard of Stoker at this juncture. Stoker, though, regarded the novel as another of his well-crafted, well-researched books, a successful work at the level of language and story.
But despite Dracula's success and endurance, Stoker's other works are unknown to just about any reader who has taken the time to travel to Transylvania with poor Jonathan Harker. If you've read any other Stoker, it's probably The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), a tale of archaeology gone way wrong. Or maybe you have read The Lair of the White Worm (1911), which is truly twisted - enough so that Ken Russell made it into a god-awful 1988 movie starring Hugh Grant - and does feature an actual giant white worm, a creature which somehow manages to be a secondary villain. "Dracula's Guest," a short story that appeared posthumously in 1914, gets some attention, mostly on the conjecture that it's the excised first chapter of its novelistic counterpart, even though Stoker intended it as a stand-alone work.
Stoker's ascent to Dracula was...