SOMETHING IN THE BLOOD. The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. By David J. Skal. SIGNED.
New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, [2016]. First Edition (& 1st printing). Original black boards with red spine panel lettered in silver. 652 pp, Notes, Bibliography, and Index; illustrations throughout plus a color glossy photo section. This copy has been specially SIGNED by the author, David J. Skal. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. A large, oversized book, uncommon signed - David J. Skal died tragically at the age of 71, in 2024. Item #314461
¶ Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with "bad blood" that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelgänger worthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.
Price (CAD): $85.00