Monthly Archives: September 2003

Put a Stake in it.

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Finished Dracula. I doubt there’s anything I can say about the novel that hasn’t been said in far more detail by more articulate people than me. For me, it’s a case of knowing too much about the experience beforehand. There were very few surprises and those were of the “this is taking much longer than I expected” variety.

I wonder what it would have been like to read the novel without all my pop culture knowledge of Dracula and vampires? I can’t think of a novel or film that gives its vampire the abilities that Stoker gives Dracula. Usually the vampire has less powers (can’t turn into bat or mist) and greater weaknesses (sunlight kills). Dracula fails in his quest (which seems to be conquering England) because … well … Van Helsing says it’s because he has a “child brain”. Basically, he doesn’t understand England and the modern world and so fails to take the proper steps for conquest.

Oh well. As I understand it, Stoker’s other supernatural novels are quite awful. I’m tempted to read them just for the fun of it. At least there would be some surprises in them. I’ve seen the Ken Russell film of Lair of the White Worm and understand that Jewel of the Seven Stars has something to do Egypt and mummies but other than that I’ve no foreknowledge of the stories.

While Trying to Bore a Child, I Accomplish Something

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Sunday night LoL was having its weekly meeting (it’s normally on Thursday but both Nizzibet and TwoM had scheduling issues) and I was puttering in the basement. Little M got tired of playing by herself and asked if she could come hang out with me. Hoping to bore her into going back upstairs I set to work tidying up the desk at my art station. The thing is covered with old bills that need filing, letters that need organizing, notes for this and that and god knows what else.

Silly me. Most kids would rather hang out with someone who is listening to them (even if that person is doing something “adult” and incomprehensible) than hang out by themselves. So I ended up actually getting some of the desk organized. And I found my passwords to Sentient 39, my Keenspace site. I set the site up a year ago and, for various reasons, never posted anything to it.

I’ve checked. The site seems to be active. Keenspace isn’t as user friendly as Epilogue. In order use it I’m going to have to learn some more html and find an ftp program. At the moment I’m not sure what I’d put up there. The original concepts I had when I signed up last year are still active in my imagination but they’re more complex than I want to tackle right now. Wild Nights in Oz wouldn’t look very good there. Finnegan’s Brink is a nice limited project that would fit there nicely but it’s still bigger than I’m ready to tackle a the moment. I’m sure something will come up. And it’s not like I’ve nothing else to do in the meantime.

Ahoy There!

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I’ve been pirated. My Mi-Go illustration from the Delta Green site has been posted to a couple of other sites without my permission. I’m a little flattered.

I found the first one at a Russian Lovecraft site. Since they have included my credit on the piece I really didn’t mind. They’d also made the effort to put together a lot of renditions of Lovecraftian beasties so the site was fun to browse even though I don’t speak Russian. I sent them an email thanking them for posting my name along with the art.

I found the second one last week at Mestrene.net which seems to be a German (Austrian? Swiss?) gaming site. They didn’t credit the piece. I haven’t decided whether to contact them or not. Fundamentally I think it’s funny but there’s this nagging voice in the back of my head that says I need to address these sorts of things.

Fangs Up Front

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I found a copy of Dracula. I think I can guess one of the reasons why the novel has endured. It gets right into the action. There’s none of the “investigation” of The Phantom, none of the easing into the mystery of Jekyll and Hyde, none of the pages of story relating to a minor character who gets told the whole story that we’re actually interested in of Frankenstein. Dracula opens with Jonathan Harker in Transylvania on his way to Castle Dracula. And pretty quickly after that, bad things start to happen. To hell with all the talk of sexual undercurrents, foreign menace and old world legends haunting the modern world – Dracula is quickly revealed to be a blood sucking menace who commands legions of Gypsies and wolves. If I didn’t already know what was going to happen I might be creeped out myself.

It is a bit funny though … Dracula has no servants so he secretly takes care of Harker the way servants normally would. Scream as Dracula sets the table! Flinch as the Master of the Undead adds just a hint of rosemary to the soup! Cover your eyes as the Prince of Darkness makes the bed! Flee in terror as the Unliving Fiend washes the dishes! Sort of embarrassing.

And Now … The Phantom!

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Finished The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston LeRoux. That takes care of three of the four major literary horror characters. The Phantom is probably at the bottom of the list in public awareness. Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde would come before him. (And perhaps the Invisible Man would come after him. I tend to forget about the Invisible Man because it’s his invisibility that people remember not his character.) And of course, the public would know Erik as the mad, scarred composer of the films rather than the world traveling freakish genius of the novel. The Lon Chaney version seems most accurate. I’ll have to watch the movie sometime.

The novel is a weird, schizophrenic thing. It lurches between comedy and terror. Erik, the Phantom, is both sad and sympathetic, angry and murderous. It’s left up to reader whether he is responsible for any of the deaths in the novel. He probably is (if only because he built the death traps) but he may not have actively killed anyone while in Paris. The hero, Raoul, and heroine, Christine, are … eh … not terribly engaging. They’re melodramatic young lovers. I didn’t have much patience for that sort of character even when I was young and melodramatic. It’s Erik and the Persian who are most interesting. And the opera house itself. After reading the book I want to visit the place and run around the back corridors and seek out the hidden places.

After the Phantom, all the great horror characters were born in the movies. The Wolfman, the Mummy are both cinematic creations. Werewolves and Egyptian sorcerors appeared in novels prior to the films but, so far as I know, the films were original stories, not based on previous works. There have been great monsters in prose since but it’s film that dominates the public imagination. C’est la vie.