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Something in the Blood

Audiobook
Biography
Unabridged   21.25 hour(s)
Publication date: 10/04/2016

Something in the Blood

The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula

Available from major retailers or BUY FROM AMAZON
Audio CD ISBN:9781681682525
Digital Download ISBN:9781681682532

Summary

A groundbreaking biography reveals the haunted origins of the man who created Dracula and traces the psychosexual contours of late Victorian society.

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Product Description

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead Count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in this psychological and cultural portrait, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as a boy, and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that informs every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance and romantic rival, Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow side―a doppelgänger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in splendidly gothic detail.

Reviews/Praise

"James Patrick Cronin performs well as the narrator. His pronunciation of the Irish names, locations, and mythological creatures is spot-on." —Library Journal Starred Audio

"[David J. Skal's] command of the material combined with his gifts as a storyteller manage to make this an authoritative book without a dull moment, its wandering narrative always returning to the shadowy corners of Victorian sexuality." —New York Times

Author Bio

David J. Skal is a leading American cultural historian and critic of horror film and literature. The author of The Monster Show and Hollywood Gothic, he lives in Glendale, California.