2020 book amnesty
In a further effort to clear the review slate, here are the books which I read in 2020 but haven't reviewed and am clearly now not going to.
9. Ali Riza Seyfioğlu (1928), Kazıklı Voyvoda / Dracula in Istanbul, trans Necip Ateş (2017) - like the Swedish and Icelandic versions, this is a bootleg of Stoker's Dracula, published within Florence Stoker's lifetime, but quite clearly without her knowledge, and is the source text for the film Drakula İstanbul'da (1953; LJ / DW). I think what I like about it best is that because it was written from a Turkish perspective and the Turks know all about the Impaler Prince who gave Mehmed II a kicking, Dracula in this version absolutely is Vlad Dracula the Wallachian voivode, or Kazıklı Bey as the Turks called him, with no ambiguity about it.
10. Michele Slung (1993), Shudder Again - bought for the story 'When The Red Storm Comes' by Sarah Smith, which is about a young woman living in a seaside town shortly before the First World War who is made into a vampire by a dashing gentleman who shows her visions of the approaching future calamity from which she will now be safe. It was OK, but not quite as 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' as I'd hoped when I heard it described at a conference. The rest is a mixed collection of short stories from different eras, all broadly horror but ranging between serial killers, gothic horrors, and the generally disturbing, with a central theme of being in some way about the relationship between sex and death. One was Robert Aickman's 'Ravissante', about a painter's surreal visit to the home of a Belgian symbolist painter's elderly wife which is probably all a big metaphor for the narrator's subconscious and has a framing device as a found document.
11. Anonymous author for Galley Press (1981), The Dracula Collection - basically a collection of fairly low-rent vampire images, including the one of Louis de Pointe du Lac holding a candelabra used for the cover of the edition of Interview with the Vampire which I have, and strung together with a narrative about Dracula showing a curious human visitor to his castle around his family portrait gallery. But the framing narrative includes some great scenes where the narrator has to imbibe strange substances, enter into and travel through another dimension in order to reach Dracula's castle. A surprisingly compelling fantastical narrative for something I had zero expectations of, and which my friend S had found for me in a charity shop.
9. Ali Riza Seyfioğlu (1928), Kazıklı Voyvoda / Dracula in Istanbul, trans Necip Ateş (2017) - like the Swedish and Icelandic versions, this is a bootleg of Stoker's Dracula, published within Florence Stoker's lifetime, but quite clearly without her knowledge, and is the source text for the film Drakula İstanbul'da (1953; LJ / DW). I think what I like about it best is that because it was written from a Turkish perspective and the Turks know all about the Impaler Prince who gave Mehmed II a kicking, Dracula in this version absolutely is Vlad Dracula the Wallachian voivode, or Kazıklı Bey as the Turks called him, with no ambiguity about it.
10. Michele Slung (1993), Shudder Again - bought for the story 'When The Red Storm Comes' by Sarah Smith, which is about a young woman living in a seaside town shortly before the First World War who is made into a vampire by a dashing gentleman who shows her visions of the approaching future calamity from which she will now be safe. It was OK, but not quite as 'Pages from a Young Girl's Journal' as I'd hoped when I heard it described at a conference. The rest is a mixed collection of short stories from different eras, all broadly horror but ranging between serial killers, gothic horrors, and the generally disturbing, with a central theme of being in some way about the relationship between sex and death. One was Robert Aickman's 'Ravissante', about a painter's surreal visit to the home of a Belgian symbolist painter's elderly wife which is probably all a big metaphor for the narrator's subconscious and has a framing device as a found document.
11. Anonymous author for Galley Press (1981), The Dracula Collection - basically a collection of fairly low-rent vampire images, including the one of Louis de Pointe du Lac holding a candelabra used for the cover of the edition of Interview with the Vampire which I have, and strung together with a narrative about Dracula showing a curious human visitor to his castle around his family portrait gallery. But the framing narrative includes some great scenes where the narrator has to imbibe strange substances, enter into and travel through another dimension in order to reach Dracula's castle. A surprisingly compelling fantastical narrative for something I had zero expectations of, and which my friend S had found for me in a charity shop.