The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [17]
`He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at his heart. The shape ... was rising to a standing posture behind his seat ... coarse hair covered it, as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin - what can I call it? - shallow, like a beast's; teeth showed behind the black lips; there was no nose; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils showed, black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy life which shone there, were the two most horrifying features in the whole vision.'
Denniston grabs at a crucifix, as at a 'magic weapon': two servants rush in, and feel `something' passing them out of the room. Denniston destroys the drawing; the `monster' is overcome and appears no more.
Three years later, in 1897, an Anglo-Irish former civil servant, Bram Stoker, published Dracula. Again, stories of blood-drinking vampires had been told at various times before in history but Stoker's version was conceived on a new plane of horror. The story divided into two parts. In the first, the hero, a young English lawyer named Harker, makes a visit to a mysterious, ruined castle deep in the wolf-infested forests of Transylvania. There is an air of indescribable evil, both about the place and about his client, Count Dracula, a man with sharp, protruding teeth and unnaturally red lips. What follows makes any `Gothic horrors' of a century before seem trivial. Harker discovers that he is trapped by a man who can crawl face downwards on the castle wall by moonlight; whom he finds one day lying as if dead, `bloated' with blood, `like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion'; who seems to be in command of a whole army of equally horrible supernatural spirits.
Just how the hero escapes from seemingly certain doom is never made clear, but the second part of the story tells of how Dracula `invades' England, and in particular the battle by Harker and a group of friends to prevent the monster taking over two young girls, one of them Harker's intended wife Mina, to recruit them into his shadowy army of the living dead. The first of them, Mina's friend Lucy, falls fatally into Dracula's power:
`Far down the avenue of yews we saw a white figure advance ... Lucy Westenra, but yet how changed. The sweetness was changed to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness... (her) lips were crimson with fresh blood... (her) eyes unclean and full of hell-fire.'
Having destroyed one `Princess; Dracula then turns his nocturnal attacks on the other, the hero's fiancee Mina. Gradually we see her sinking away into the monster's deadly power. Harker and his friends eventually hunt Dracula down and pursue him back to his Transylvanian lair where, just in the nick of time before Mina finally expires, they manage to operate their `magic weapon' by plunging a stake into the monster's heart (the only way a vampire can be killed):
`Before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.'
Mina - and mankind - are saved!
In 1898, the year after Dracula, H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds. Again, it was by no means the first science fiction story, but the comparatively cosy fantasies of Jules Verne had contained nothing like this. Puffs of fire are seen on Mars, huge meteorites flash across the sky, and some come to earth in southern England. The initial mood of excited curiosity changes to alarm, when it appears that these mysterious, half-buried cylinders contain life:
'As it bulged up and caught the light, it glistened like wet leather. The large, darkcoloured eyes were regarding us steadfastly. It was rounded, and had, one might say, a face. There was a mouth under the eyes, the brim of which quivered and panted and dropped saliva,