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The Desert Island Books web site proudly asserts that Elizabeth Miller's Dracula: Sense & Nonsense "has a claim to be the most important ever written on the subject of Dracula." Whether that is true or not remains to be seen; it is, how­ever, an impressive compendium of misinformation about Bram Stoker's 1897 horror classic. Miller, who teaches English at Newfoundland's Memorial University, sets straight not only leading Dracula scholars, but also non-specialists and popular film and television documentaries that have perpetuated wrong infor­mation about events in the novel and the facts surrounding its composition, the supposed "real" Count Dracula and his cas­tle, and even rumours surrounding Stoker himself. While she does not present any new interpretations of the novel, Miller is intent on demolishing critical readings particularly psychoan­alytic readings based on faulty knowledge. She keeps strictly to provable facts and is extremely wary of any sort of conjecture. As a result, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense is essential reading for anyone attempting a critical study of Stoker's novel.

Dracula: Sense & Nonsense is part of a series, The Desert Island Dracula Library, developed by literary scholar and publisher Clive Leatherdale to reinstate Bram Stoker's place in the literary canon. While six of the twelve books available in The Li­brary are studies of the novel itself, the remaining six offer modern annotated editions of Stoker's other works. Although none of these is as important as Dracula, they do set Stoker's best known novel in an important context. Thus, while the small Desert Island catalogue may seem to have an eclectic focus its main publications apart from studies of Bram Stoker are an extensive collection of histories of British soccer teams and some historical studies of Essex it is no vanity press, and Miller's book lives up to proper scholarly standards.

Miller divides her study into several sections not quite "compiled like an encyclopedia," as the Desert Island website would have us believe arranged in short entries. She begins each entry with a quotation from a misguided source and then offers both a pithy editorial remark and a longer explanation of the facts. Some of the sections, such as those on Stoker's sources and the composition of the novel, are clearly of interest mainly to specialists, although they do provide useful background information on Stoker and his research on vampires. Miller also effectively dispels speculation about Stoker's psy­chosexual motives for writing the book, particularly speculation about his repressed homosexual heroworship of Henry Irving, his sexless marriage to Florence Stoker, and his death allegedly from syphilis (not true!). The chapter on misinformation about events in the novel itself will be hardly surprising to anyone who has actually read the book. The chapter is useful, though, for drawing attention to details that readers too familiar with Hollywood film versions may miss. For example, Dracula is not killed by sunlight; Miller lists several occasions where the Count conducts his London business during daylight hours. Similarly, the long held assertion that Dracula is killed with a stake to the heart is shown to be untrue: while the vampire form of Lucy Westenra is dispatched in such a manner, Dracula himself is killed with two knives. Finally, Miller puts to rest any notion that Stoker's Count has any erotic appeal for Lucy (or anyone else): she rightly points out his "receding hairline, bad breath […] protruding teeth and red eyes" and concludes "hardly a '10' on anyone's scale" (129). Only F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu highlights the hideousness of Dracula's appearance.

Perhaps the two most important chapters of the book are those on the geography of the novel and Stoker's apparent use of Vlad the Impaler as an inspiration for his Count. In the former chapter, Miller takes great pains to point out that Stoker drew almost all his information about Transylvania from a popular travel narrative many scholars claim he conducted first hand research for his novel by visiting the areas he describes. Fur­ther, she stresses that the geography of Transylvania itself is often misrepresented to make the real places mentioned con­form to their fictional reworkings in the novel. Stoker clearly borrowed some names and made up his own landscape so that any search for the "real" Dracula must first recognise that his castle only existed in Stoker's imagination. To that end, any attempt to connect Dracula with the fifteenth century Voivode of Wallachia, Vlad Tepes (nicknamed "The Impaler") is flatly misguided. Miller demonstrates that not only is there no evi­dence that Vlad Tepes ever had a reputation as a vampire; more to the point, Stoker actually knew very little about him and found only a reference to the term "dracula," the Wallachian word for "devil," applied to a Wallachian Voivode. Stoker liked the term, which he promptly assigned to his own character. Stoker's own working notes for the novel, admittedly unavail­able to scholars for many years, never mention Vlad the Impaler. Miller's point, that many otherwise sound interpretations of the novel assume this erroneous connection between Count Dracula and the historical Vlad Tepes, is well taken and must surely be the last word on this subject.

Dracula: Sense & Nonsense is an enjoyable, highly readable study that manages to be lively and entertaining without sacri­ficing scholarly rigour. Although clearly of interest to scholars of Stoker and his famous novel, it is also interesting enough even to casual readers of Dracula. Reading Miller's book prompted my own re-reading of the original novel with a renewed insight and a fresh desire to catch the details that I missed on my first encounter with this fascinating novel.

NOEL CHEVALIER / University of Regina

[from English Studies in Canada, 28:4 (December 2002), pp. 749-51]

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