Five Quarts_ A Personal and Natural History of Blood - Bill Hayes [71]
Now, trading horror for horror, the coolness of science for the seduction of literature: Set in the same century, this next story revolves around the same unsavory deed—the taking of blood—yet to an altogether different end and employing a more sensual methodology. The basic plot should be familiar, even if you’ve yet to read the tale in its original form. Within a handful of pages, our protagonist stands in the gloom of a desolate night, in a foreign land, on the doorstep of an enormous stone castle. He finds no bell or knocker and is unsure how to signal his arrival after the arduous journey from London. Just then, a noise from within: rattling chains followed by the clanking of massive bolts, a key thrust into the lock. At last the door swings open. Centered in the entryway stands a tall older gentleman dressed in black, clean-shaven but for a long white mustache. His pale, pale skin picks up none of the warmth cast by the flickering lamp he carries. “Welcome to my house!” he says in peculiarly inflected English. “Enter freely and of your own will!”
The weary traveler shakes an ice-cold hand, and the elder man makes it official: “I am Dracula.”
If you, too, are still puzzling over that long white mustache, I’m right there with you. The Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the template for bloodsucking horror since its publication in 1897, does not resemble Bela Lugosi; nor does sunlight destroy him. The story of the Transylvanian vampire has been retold and reimagined in such varied contexts—from early Hollywood flicks to adult films, a soap opera to video games, and a breakfast cereal to the number-obsessed Count von Count from Sesame Street—that it’s fascinating to discover elements in the original source that, more than a century later, feel new. How creepy, for instance, is Dracula’s lizard-like way of scaling walls. And how clever is his strategy of concealing fifty coffins throughout the greater London area so that, after prowling, he has a wide variety of places to rest during the daytime. And, oh yes, the way the heroes use Communion wafers to render these coffins unsleepable. At the same time, it’s great to find all those familiar trappings of vampire lore: the mirrors that don’t reflect, the fangs, the turning into a bat, the garlic, the stake through the heart. And sure enough, the greedy mouthfuls of blood. Save for the Bible, no other work in the English language has had, I’d wager, a stronger impact on how people of the modern Western world think and feel about blood. Blood as dangerous and profane as opposed to sacred and profound.
Stoker’s novel, originally titled The Un-Dead, a term the Dubliner coined, is more ambitious than I had remembered, technically as well as psychologically. But Dracula is also very much a dusty product of its era. Abraham (Bram) Stoker (1847–1912) wrote a conventional Gothic novel, the type of romantic fiction that first appeared in England in the mid-eighteenth century, a forerunner of the bodice ripper and the modern mystery novel. True to the form, Dracula features a damsel in distress (two, actually); a good guy (in this case, a quintet of good guys); and a tall, dark villain, although here, obviously, Stoker created a new standard of darkness. As was typical of Gothic fiction, the action takes place in ominous locations, shadowy and perilous, the most archetypal of which is the count’s home, Castle Dracula.
Stoker wrote the novel during a seven-year period that neatly falls between two major advances in the understanding of blood: the