Rue Morgue Review

Draculas Homep

[from Rue Morgue #23 (October 2001), p. 76]
Elizabeth Miller has come not to prate about Dracula, but to bury him--or at the very least drag him kicking and screaming into the sunlight. Dracula: Sense & Nonsense lays to rest close to one hundred popular misconceptions about the infamous, fictitious vampire. It is the Memorial University of Newfoundland professor's third academic text on the monster and his myths. Bad blood? As fellow vampire scholar Clive Leatherdale explains in his introduction, Dracula lore became mired in purposeful misdirection in the 1970s, little to none of which has ever been redressed. (Surprisingly, it turns out that Anne Rice is not to blame.) Nor did a century of "faithful" cinematic adaptations help matters--Coppola culpa, Coppola maxima culpa. Easily the most notorious of these for-the-most-part groundless speculations is the notion that Dracula author Bram Stoker based his character on the historical figure Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes. "Accepted as axiomatic, circumstantial at best," states Miller--quite generously, considering her case against that little point. Other well-known claims that Miller stakes include the seeming omnipresence of vampire bats in Europe (an ambitious commute from South America--how disappointed they must have been not to have appeared in Stoker's novel) and the Count's aversion to daylight (Dracula offers no fewer than seven instances of its protagonist working 9-to-5). Miller divides her expose into six specific sections, including the sources, the author, the novel itself, and an entire chapter concerning the facts in the case of M. Impaler. Examination of the dubious claims in point/counterpoint fashion, coupled with the scholar's exclamatory enthusiasm for the process of debunking--"Balderdash!" "Triple trash!" "Rubbish!"--makes for an entertaining, episodic read. The last word on Dracula? Miller herself points out that the first word (after the novel) remains the yet-unpublished collection of Stoker's own Working Notes And Papers For Dracula, available for public viewing at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. That said, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense is a coffin full of bones worth picking and dirt worth turning; an undeniably enlightening read for Transylvanian tourists and children of the night alike.

[from Rue Morgue #23 (October 2001), p. 76]

Elizabeth Miller has come not to prate about Dracula, but to bury him--or at the very least drag him kicking and screaming into the sunlight. Dracula: Sense & Nonsense lays to rest close to one hundred popular misconceptions about the infamous, fictitious vampire. It is the Memorial University of Newfoundland professor's third academic text on the monster and his myths.

Bad blood? As fellow vampire scholar Clive Leatherdale explains in his introduction, Dracula lore became mired in purposeful misdirection in the 1970s, little to none of which has ever been redressed. (Surprisingly, it turns out that Anne Rice is not to blame.) Nor did a century of "faithful" cinematic adaptations help matters--Coppola culpa, Coppola maxima culpa.

Easily the most notorious of these for-the-most-part groundless speculations is the notion that Dracula author Bram Stoker based his character on the historical figure Vlad "The Impaler" Tepes. "Accepted as axiomatic, circumstantial at best," states Miller--quite generously, considering her case against that little point.

Other well-known claims that Miller stakes include the seeming omnipresence of vampire bats in Europe (an ambitious commute from South America--how disappointed they must have been not to have appeared in Stoker's novel) and the Count's aversion to daylight (Dracula offers no fewer than seven instances of its protagonist working 9-to-5).

Miller divides her expose into six specific sections, including the sources, the author, the novel itself, and an entire chapter concerning the facts in the case of M. Impaler. Examination of the dubious claims in point/counterpoint fashion, coupled with the scholar's exclamatory enthusiasm for the process of debunking--"Balderdash!" "Triple trash!" "Rubbish!"--makes for an entertaining, episodic read.

The last word on Dracula? Miller herself points out that the first word (after the novel) remains the yet-unpublished collection of Stoker's own Working Notes And Papers For Dracula, available for public viewing at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia. That said, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense is a coffin full of bones worth picking and dirt worth turning; an undeniably enlightening read for Transylvanian tourists and children of the night alike.