Peter Haining - The Dracula Centenary Book

Peter Haining - The Dracula Centenary Book (Souvenir Press, 1987)



Acknowledgements

Dracula Lives!
An Amazing Story of Resurrection
The Birth of the Legend
The Bloodthirsty Parents of Dracula
Dracula by Day—and Other Misconceptions
The Count Who Won't Lie Down
Playing the Master of the Undead
Tales of the Vampire Hunter
'The Bloofer Ladies'
The Wurdalak Who Might Have Been Dracula

Appendices

Emily de Laszowska Gerard - Transylvanian Superstitions
A Checklist of Vampirism
Bela Lugosi - I Like Playing Dracula
The Dracula Films
Dr David H. Dolphin - Vampires — The Mystery Diagnosed
Dracula Societies

Trust Peter Haining to steal a march on his rivals by getting in his Dracula centenary celebrations ten years before everyone else! His reasoning; a manuscript of The Un-dead found in a trunk (other contents: several rat corpses) on a Pennsylvania farm proves that Stoker began work on his novel a decade before it was published, so therefore Dracula was invented in 1887 and not 1997 as all those pompous lit. bores would have us believe. Be that as it may, what follows is a competent if unspectacular history of the novel and it's several off-shoots (although sadly, no pulp) which hauls in all the usual suspects - Vlad the Impaler, Countess Bathory, Bela Lugosi, Sir C. Lee, etc., - the whole set off with numerous film-stills you've probably encountered once or twice in other books on the subject. It's an OK book, but in my humble, not in the same league as the mighty The Dracula Scrapbook (NEL, 1976), which makes it slightly irksome that ..... Centenary Book was reissued under that title (as an instant remainder?) by Bounty Books in 1992.