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Post by andydecker on Jun 19, 2022 9:49:49 GMT
Although it's not stated outright, I'd always thought Drac has established some sort of psychic connection with Renfield over distance, rather than that they'd physically met somewhere - that he'd homed in on Renfield because he was unusually susceptible to Dracula's influence. After all, Renfield is a nut who's trying to live forever by eating his way through a hierarchy of species, until presumably he eats a human being - but in his lucid moments he's also a smart guy who could be a useful ally - surely that's why Dracula buys Carfax Abbey, right next to the nut house. Unfortunately Renfield falls in love with Mina and that's his downfall (or salvation - whichever way you look at it). It makes sense. This is one of the more serious problems of the novel. Stoker is not very forthcoming with back story. Why Holmwood, Seward and Morris know each other is at least established in one or two lines, but Renfield remains the same enigma as Van Helsing. It is hard to decide if this is better or if Renfield would have been the cannibal of Whitechapel before thrown into the nuthouse or whatever. Of course Stoker liked his coincidences as plot motor too much. Dracula's first victim Lucy is the friend of the fiancee of the man he has imprisonend (and happens to be at the place he lands in England), Lucy has been the love interest of Seward, who 'treats' Renfield and lives next to the house Dracula buys. At least the last thing he made more plausible with Dracula having a few hide-outs. Still it is all a bit much. :-) |
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Post by Dr Strange on Jun 19, 2022 12:07:04 GMT
Although it's not stated outright, I'd always thought Drac has established some sort of psychic connection with Renfield over distance, rather than that they'd physically met somewhere - that he'd homed in on Renfield because he was unusually susceptible to Dracula's influence. After all, Renfield is a nut who's trying to live forever by eating his way through a hierarchy of species, until presumably he eats a human being... Yes, that's what I thought too - that the particular form that Renfield's insanity takes is what leads Dracula to him, rather than some prior interaction with Dracula being the cause of his insanity. |
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Post by jamesdoig on Jun 19, 2022 20:49:51 GMT
Of course Stoker liked his coincidences as plot motor too much. Yes, it's very much a feature of Victorian fiction - over credulous I guess, all in the name of a neat plot. In the 20th century, fiction went the other way - life can get in the way. That short Frederich Durrenmatt crime novel, The Pledge, is a good example of that - the detective has worked out who the child killer is, has worked out when he's going to appear and is lying in wait for him, but the killer never appears and the 'rational' detective goes mad as a result. It turns out the killer has died in a car crash on the way... |
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Post by jamesdoig on Jun 21, 2022 4:21:16 GMT
It's been a busy few weeks - first H.T.W. Bousfield, then Australian Nightmares, now it's Reginal Hodder's The Vampire, which Ramble House is bringing out shortly. It's a pretty rare vampire novel published by Rider in 1913, and often omitted in vampire bibliographies. This is Gavin O'Keefe's draft cover, which looks really good I reckon:  |
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Post by dem on Jun 21, 2022 7:27:55 GMT
Well done, James. Am planning to make a start on Australian Nightmares once done with Studio of Screams.
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Post by helrunar on Jun 21, 2022 13:45:53 GMT
Thanks for the cover of the vampire novel. It sounds intriguing!
cheers, Hel.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jun 25, 2022 4:36:07 GMT
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Post by Michael Connolly on Jun 25, 2022 10:56:50 GMT
Renfield was memorably played by Roland Topor (author of The Tenant) in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979):  In Herzog's film, Renfield is Jonathan Harker's estate agent employer, who was initially contacted by Dracula about purchasing some property and who sends Harker to Transylvania to complete the deal - this then accounts for the link between Renfield and Dracula, something that is never explained in the book. Francis Ford Coppola also used a variation on this in his version of Dracula in 1992, where Renfield (played by Tom Waits) was Harker's predecessor in dealing with the Count and went mad after visiting him at Castle Dracula. Herzog's Nosferatu remake bored me stiff: c.tenor.com/2mbfrRoGOUYAAAAd/dracula-rising.gif |
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Post by helrunar on Jun 25, 2022 15:13:15 GMT
Fabulous gif, Michael! I need to watch Nosferatu, the real one, again soon! I have to admit I'm intrigued by the potential of Robert Eggers' remake but it seems still to be something of a castle in Transylvania, so to speak.
H.
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Post by jamesdoig on Jun 29, 2022 9:37:15 GMT
From the Vinnies shop for a buck. I think this is the first time I've bought a Marion Zimmer Bradley book, but was intrigued by the cover, which looks a lot like Bruce Pennington. The foreword also mentions a 'Lovecraftian old farmhouse', which sounded promising.   |
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Post by helrunar on Jun 29, 2022 14:50:44 GMT
Great cover art. I'm not familiar with that particular book by MZB.
This image would be a laudable entry in the "Down the back of the Vault" gallery.
Hope the book does not disappoint! MZB is a mixed bag for me. The "Light" series (Witchlight, etc.) held my interest more than my attempts to read the Darkover books. I read Mists of Avalon back when I was living in Taiwan in the 1980s. I'd give it a B. There was an awful TV movie made from it some time ago.
cheers, Hel.
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Post by dem on Jul 1, 2022 18:01:03 GMT
An eclectic, not much horror but who's fussed assortment via friend Richard's stall last Sunday a.m. Ray Bradbury - The October Country (Ace 1961) The Dwarf
The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse
Skeleton
The Jar
The Traveller
The Emissary
Touched with Fire
The Scythe
Uncle Einar
The Wind
There Was an Old Woman
Homecoming
The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone L. Clovis Trouille: Detail from Voyeuse: R. Gustave Dore Angela Carter - The Sadeian Woman (Virago, 1979) Blurb "0 charming sex, you will be free; just as men are, you shall all enjoy the pleasures that Nature makes your duty; must the divine half of mankind be kept in chains by the other? Ah, break those bonds; nature wills it."
SEXUALITY IS POWER — so says the Marquis de Sade, philosopher and pornographer extraordinary. His Justine keeps to the rules laid down by men, her reward rape and humiliation; Juliette, her monstrous antithesis, viciously exploits her sexuality in a world where all tenderness is false, all beds are minefields.
But in Angela Carter, Sade has met his match. With wit and genius, she takes on these outrageous figments|of his extreme imagination, and transforms them into the symbols of our time - the Hollywood sex goddesses, mothers and daughters, pornography, even the sacred shrines of sex and marriage lie devastatingly exposed before our eyes. With the precision of a surgeon, Angela Carter delves into the viscera of our distorted sexuality and reveals a dazzling vision of love which admits neither of conqueror nor of conquered.Kellow Chesney - The Victorian Underworld (Penguin, 1991; originally Maurice Temple Smith, 1970). Blurb: Beneath the respectable surface of Victorian England lay a criminal world as diverse, turbulent and vicious as any.
Kellow Chesney begins his superbly evocative survey of this vast substratum of vice by looking at that ‘most enlightened age’ and at its penal methods. He then re-creates in detail the showmen religious fakes, garrotters, pickpockets, prostitutes and magsmen who thronged the murky rookeries and 'lays’ of the cities. Idiosyncratic, brutal and unmerciful it was a Babylon teeming with misery and horror.
John Carnell - New Worlds Science Fiction Vol 40. No 120 (Nova Publications, July 1962)
Anon - New Worlds Profiles: Harry Harrison
Harry Harrison - Guest Editorial: What Is Wrong With British Science Fiction
Donald Malcolm - Yorick
Steve Hall - Paradox Lost
J. G. Ballard - The Man on the 99th Floor
Francis G. Rayer - Sixth Veil
P. F. Woods - Double Time
Brian W. Aldiss - Minor Operation (series; part 2 of 3)
John Carnell - ABC Television's Out of This World
Michael Sims [ed.] - Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (Bloomsbury, 2011)
Blurb:
"A fine collection, by turns humorous, foul and ghastly" - Jazz Jagger, Financial Times
Before Twilight and True Blood, vampires haunted the nineteenth century, when brilliant writers indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker’s legendary 1897 novel, Dracula. Michael Sims bring together the finest vampire stories of the Victorian era in a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety. Beginning with the supposedly true accounts that captivated Lord Byron and Mary Shelley, the stories range from Aleksei Tolstoy’s tale of a vampire family to Stoker's own 'Dracula's Guest' — a chapter omitted from his landmark novel.
Table of contents Here.
Stephen Colegrave & Chris Sullivan - Punk (Bounty, 2013: originally Octopus, 2001)
Blurb:
This book gives voice to the punk generation 35 years on...
The art of Damien Hirst and the music of the Prodigy, the attitude of Liam Gallagher and the hair of Eminem - all owe a great debt to the cultural movement that burrowed through Andy Warhol's Factory and the early 1970s' New York underground emerging triumphant, kicking and screaming at the top of the British popular music charts, some five years later. Affectionately known as 'punk', it was the spotty, scruffy, bastard offspring of many a grander musical form, but like many a prodigal, went on to become more successful than its forebears, leaving a legacy that is still recognized today.
This book gives voice to the punk generation 35 years on, as it remembers the mad, frenzied and often incoherent world of 1975-9. With nearly 100 contributors, including specially commissioned interviews with members and managers of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Ramones, the Heartbreakers, Siouxsie and the Banshees and many others, everybody has had a chance to speak, and their memories are supported by hundreds of previously unpublished photographs.
Variously described as middle class, working class, political, social, sexual, artistic, superficial, perverted, puerile and heroic, punk has always inspired controversy. Now it is for the reader to decide the truth or truths that fuelled this unique movement.
The last outrageous thing that happened before the Pistols was the Rolling Stones pissing up the wall. - Paul Cook, drummer, the Sex Pistols
We imagined ourselves into this life, and we just lived it... - Legs McNeil, writer, Punk Magazine
Sid asked, 'Did I kill Nancy? I don't know.' I said, 'No, you didn't' and he said, 'Good, I'm glad.' - Leee Childers, ex-manager, the Stooges and the Heartbreakers
These lunatics walked down the Kings Road in lipstick and high heels, but they were really hard. They were the New York Dolls. - Joe Corré, son of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren
Punk was a complete subculture. Nothing since then has been that complete. I still live by all that shit. Hip-hop is black punk rock. - Don Letts, film-maker and DJ
Al Spicer - The Rough Guide to Punk[/i] (Rough Guides/ Penguin, 2006) Blurb: Safety pins, spitting, Stooges, Sid & Nancy
The Rough Guide to Punk casts a sneering glance at the musicians, fashions, icons and record labels behind the sub-culture that revolutionized pop music.
The guide includes profiles of more than 250 artists, from legends such as the Sex Pistols and X-Ray Spex to contemporary stars like Green Day and Babyshambles.
There are critical reviews of landmark albums and classic singles, plus the lowdown on everything from safety pins and bondage trousers to venues like The Roxy and CBGBs.
The guide comes complete with recommended playlists of the best, loudest and angriest slices of punk waiting to be downloaded to your iPod or MP3 player. |
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Post by andydecker on Jul 1, 2022 19:29:07 GMT
An eclectic, not much horror but who's fussed assortment via friend Richard's stall last Sunday a.m. L. Clovis Trouille: Detail from Voyeuse: R. Gustave Dore So wonderful covers. The Carter is a inspired choice, the Dore is creepy. John Carnell - New Worlds Science Fiction Vol 40. No 120 (Nova Publications, July 1962) Last year I managed to get two original issues of New Worlds after rekindling my fascination for Moorcock's run as editor and the superior writing of Ballard. In today's cultural wasteland it is hard to imagine how this must have been for readers. The letters to the editor are particulary interesting, this sense of a new start, to do something new (in the Moorcock issues). It was a futile fight, at the end Doc Smith won (in the guise of Star Wars).
But it was a strange impression to held those Carnell issues. They are nearly as old as I am, and in many regards they felt like relics.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 1, 2022 19:49:17 GMT
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Post by jamesdoig on Jul 3, 2022 0:37:57 GMT
A mild bonanza at the junkshop this morning, these for $2 each: You have to admire a writer who calls his book The Scurrying  Killer pike:  Scarce spirit-of-jack-the-ripper-is-raised-during-a-seance book:  Nice picture of Veronica Hart pruning bushes on the inside cover:  (Actually Veronica Hart was a pseudonym of Victor Kelleher) Skin by Kothe Koya - now I've got this and Bad Brains, which I must read some day.    And this for some reason:  |
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