Books read 2023
I don't think I'm going to manage to complete another book before the end of 2023 now, so it seems like time to post this list of what I read this year, with brief notes on each. I don't have pictures of all of them, because I've already returned one borrowed book to its owner and read another on Kindle, but these are the ones I do have:
1. Tony Thorne (1997), Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Bathory - lent to me by Joel. I read about three fifths of it ahead of and during the DracSoc Slovakia trip in August / September 2022, but then put it aside for a bit and only finished it in early 2023. As one DracSoc member said when I showed it to him, "Oh, yes, that is the book" (on Bathory). It certainly helped me get more out of the trip, in that I understood who the owners of the castles we were visiting were and their political context. It's very thoroughly researched, making full use of all possible primary sources, but also recognises that the reader is likely to be starting from fictionalised scandals, and works backwards from there through the accretions of legend. The conclusion is essentially that Bathory certainly did treat her servants very badly, including inflicting some quite deliberately sadistic and humiliating punishments and probably causing some deaths. But so did most aristocrats at the time. The difference between her and everyone else was that she ended up a widow in charge of substantial estates and in the way of politically powerful people, so they used behaviour which would usually be ignored as the basis for a very rapidly-conducted trial to get rid of her. As for the notion of her using blood to pursue a youthful appearance, that wasn't part of the original accusations at all, being added to embroidered versions of the story long after her death.
2. Stephen Jones, ed. (2011), The Mammoth Book of Dracula - a book of short stories, lent to me by Joel, all of which feature Dracula in some way or another. There are 34 of them, adding up to a book of 553 pages, so it got a bit interminable after a while, but there are some good stories in there, from a mix of well-known and lesser-known names. I think my favourite was 'When Greek Meets Greek' by Basil Copper, in which Dracula and his daughter haunt a holiday resort, drawing unwary visitors into their snares, which made good use of the landscape and its antiquities.
3. Jules Verne (1892), The Castle of the Carpathians - read via Kindle as preparation for the DracSoc Romania trip in May, which included a visit to Colţ, the castle which inspired the story. As with the Bathory book for the Slovakia trip, it definitely paid off, in that some aspects of the castle matched the description in the novel very closely - towering starkly above a valley with trees growing on the battlements readily visible from the village below. I'd vaguely meant to read it for a while anyway, as it is occasionally cited as a possible inspiration for Stoker's Dracula, but I don't think that stands up either chronologically (given Stoker had already developed most of the relevant parts of his plot by the time this was published) or thematically. It is a story of lost love and long-held grievances, with what appear to be supernatural occurrences early on later given rational explanations (which will be entirely obvious far in advance to modern readers). It's only quite short, though, and has plenty to it, so I would generally recommend it.
4. Neagu Djuvara (2014), A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians - originally published in 1999, but this English-language illustrated edition published in 2014 and bought by me on my first Romania trip in 2015. A bird's eye view sweep of Romanian history in 343 pages with wide margins and lots of illustrations. The author was in the fascist government of Ion Antonescu during the Second World War, and it shows. However, it was another useful piece of pre-reading for the May DracSoc trip, which helped me to tie together the isolated snippets of what I knew of Romanian history (mainly about the Roman period and the era of Vlad III Dracula) into a bigger picture.
5. Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker (2018), Dracul - Dacre's second effort at capitalising on the family legacy. It's grounded in a well-researched knowledge of Bram Stoker's biography, especially his childhood, as you'd hope from a family member, and that's probably what most makes it worth reading. As a story in its own right, it is pretty solid, and certainly better than Dacre's previous co-authored effort, but I wouldn't say stellar. It also doesn't feature any scenes whatsoever set in Romania, as I had hoped when I started reading it, and the 'Dracul' of the title seems to be just the Dracula of Bram's novel, rather than the historical Vlad III Dracula's father, as I had also assumed!
6. Michael Wheatley (2022), The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan - bought in the bookshop in Whitby when we visited in March. I read a couple of stories then, but most in the run-up to a Nunkie double-bill of 'The Man Who Went Too Far' and 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' at the Black Swan in York. Another good investment of time, as I was absolutely steeped in the genre by the time of the show, so really saw the connections between the stories we were hearing and the others I had read. A great genre and a great collection.
7. Alberto Breccia (2021), Alberto Breccia's Dracula - bought for me as a birthday present by S, this is a collection of five stories about Dracula told in graphic novel format but with almost no words whatsoever, drawn in the early 1980s by an Argentinian comic artist. They reflect the series of horrendous military dictatorships which Argentina was going through at the time, in one case very directly - Dracula witnesses the murders and the poverty and is driven to pray in church for the people he regards as his to drain. A fascinating take on and use of the Dracula figure.
8. Joseph O'Connor (2019), Shadowplay - lent to me by Joel, I recommend this very highly indeed. It's about the entwined lives of Bram Stoker, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and the Lyceum theatre, and certainly rewards an existing knowledge of those. It's a fictionalised version of their reality, with lots of little nods to the content of Stoker's fiction, Irving's plays, and the wider gothic and horror traditions. But it doesn't depend on that knowledge at all, and meanwhile is stylistically beautiful, incredibly vividly characterised and full of poignant insights into love, friendship, working relationships and the whole endeavour of being human. The best book I've read since Jim Shepard's Nosferatu in Love.
9. Robert Aickman (1964 / 2014), Dark Entries - bought at the Bradford Waterstones during the ReVamped weekend, and read on and off between other books, when reading a short story rather than committing to a novel happened to suit me. It's the second full Aickman collection I've read, after Cold Hand in Mine, in addition to a few individual stories in collections, and very much in keeping with his usual style and quality. Every story has stayed with me in its own way, but perhaps 'The Waiting Room' most of all, and probably because it is relatively simple compared to the others. Just a guy seeing long-dead passengers in a freezing-cold waiting room overnight, really, but done with an efficacy few authors could manage.
10. Doug Lamoureux (2014), Dracula's Demeter - also lent to me by Joel, and read in anticipation of The Last Voyage of the Demeter coming out (not that it has yet officially in the UK, but we did manage to see it!). Again, it paid off, in that there are definite resonances with the film, particularly between the ways the character of Harrington in the book and Clemens in the film come aboard. And on the whole it's a decent enough novel which certainly ties in well with Stoker's. But neither the characterisation of the ship's crew nor the written style is strong enough to deliver the sort of cabin-fever narrative which this story and setting should be able to provide. Also, reading it right after Shadowplay did it no favours by way of contrast! It clearly hadn't even been properly proof-read, with all sorts of spelling errors and weird formatting. Never mind, I was clearly going to have to read it some time anyway, and now I have.
1. Tony Thorne (1997), Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Bathory - lent to me by Joel. I read about three fifths of it ahead of and during the DracSoc Slovakia trip in August / September 2022, but then put it aside for a bit and only finished it in early 2023. As one DracSoc member said when I showed it to him, "Oh, yes, that is the book" (on Bathory). It certainly helped me get more out of the trip, in that I understood who the owners of the castles we were visiting were and their political context. It's very thoroughly researched, making full use of all possible primary sources, but also recognises that the reader is likely to be starting from fictionalised scandals, and works backwards from there through the accretions of legend. The conclusion is essentially that Bathory certainly did treat her servants very badly, including inflicting some quite deliberately sadistic and humiliating punishments and probably causing some deaths. But so did most aristocrats at the time. The difference between her and everyone else was that she ended up a widow in charge of substantial estates and in the way of politically powerful people, so they used behaviour which would usually be ignored as the basis for a very rapidly-conducted trial to get rid of her. As for the notion of her using blood to pursue a youthful appearance, that wasn't part of the original accusations at all, being added to embroidered versions of the story long after her death.
2. Stephen Jones, ed. (2011), The Mammoth Book of Dracula - a book of short stories, lent to me by Joel, all of which feature Dracula in some way or another. There are 34 of them, adding up to a book of 553 pages, so it got a bit interminable after a while, but there are some good stories in there, from a mix of well-known and lesser-known names. I think my favourite was 'When Greek Meets Greek' by Basil Copper, in which Dracula and his daughter haunt a holiday resort, drawing unwary visitors into their snares, which made good use of the landscape and its antiquities.
3. Jules Verne (1892), The Castle of the Carpathians - read via Kindle as preparation for the DracSoc Romania trip in May, which included a visit to Colţ, the castle which inspired the story. As with the Bathory book for the Slovakia trip, it definitely paid off, in that some aspects of the castle matched the description in the novel very closely - towering starkly above a valley with trees growing on the battlements readily visible from the village below. I'd vaguely meant to read it for a while anyway, as it is occasionally cited as a possible inspiration for Stoker's Dracula, but I don't think that stands up either chronologically (given Stoker had already developed most of the relevant parts of his plot by the time this was published) or thematically. It is a story of lost love and long-held grievances, with what appear to be supernatural occurrences early on later given rational explanations (which will be entirely obvious far in advance to modern readers). It's only quite short, though, and has plenty to it, so I would generally recommend it.
4. Neagu Djuvara (2014), A Brief Illustrated History of Romanians - originally published in 1999, but this English-language illustrated edition published in 2014 and bought by me on my first Romania trip in 2015. A bird's eye view sweep of Romanian history in 343 pages with wide margins and lots of illustrations. The author was in the fascist government of Ion Antonescu during the Second World War, and it shows. However, it was another useful piece of pre-reading for the May DracSoc trip, which helped me to tie together the isolated snippets of what I knew of Romanian history (mainly about the Roman period and the era of Vlad III Dracula) into a bigger picture.
5. Dacre Stoker and J.D. Barker (2018), Dracul - Dacre's second effort at capitalising on the family legacy. It's grounded in a well-researched knowledge of Bram Stoker's biography, especially his childhood, as you'd hope from a family member, and that's probably what most makes it worth reading. As a story in its own right, it is pretty solid, and certainly better than Dacre's previous co-authored effort, but I wouldn't say stellar. It also doesn't feature any scenes whatsoever set in Romania, as I had hoped when I started reading it, and the 'Dracul' of the title seems to be just the Dracula of Bram's novel, rather than the historical Vlad III Dracula's father, as I had also assumed!
6. Michael Wheatley (2022), The Horned God: Weird Tales of the Great God Pan - bought in the bookshop in Whitby when we visited in March. I read a couple of stories then, but most in the run-up to a Nunkie double-bill of 'The Man Who Went Too Far' and 'The Piper at the Gates of Dawn' at the Black Swan in York. Another good investment of time, as I was absolutely steeped in the genre by the time of the show, so really saw the connections between the stories we were hearing and the others I had read. A great genre and a great collection.
7. Alberto Breccia (2021), Alberto Breccia's Dracula - bought for me as a birthday present by S, this is a collection of five stories about Dracula told in graphic novel format but with almost no words whatsoever, drawn in the early 1980s by an Argentinian comic artist. They reflect the series of horrendous military dictatorships which Argentina was going through at the time, in one case very directly - Dracula witnesses the murders and the poverty and is driven to pray in church for the people he regards as his to drain. A fascinating take on and use of the Dracula figure.
8. Joseph O'Connor (2019), Shadowplay - lent to me by Joel, I recommend this very highly indeed. It's about the entwined lives of Bram Stoker, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry and the Lyceum theatre, and certainly rewards an existing knowledge of those. It's a fictionalised version of their reality, with lots of little nods to the content of Stoker's fiction, Irving's plays, and the wider gothic and horror traditions. But it doesn't depend on that knowledge at all, and meanwhile is stylistically beautiful, incredibly vividly characterised and full of poignant insights into love, friendship, working relationships and the whole endeavour of being human. The best book I've read since Jim Shepard's Nosferatu in Love.
9. Robert Aickman (1964 / 2014), Dark Entries - bought at the Bradford Waterstones during the ReVamped weekend, and read on and off between other books, when reading a short story rather than committing to a novel happened to suit me. It's the second full Aickman collection I've read, after Cold Hand in Mine, in addition to a few individual stories in collections, and very much in keeping with his usual style and quality. Every story has stayed with me in its own way, but perhaps 'The Waiting Room' most of all, and probably because it is relatively simple compared to the others. Just a guy seeing long-dead passengers in a freezing-cold waiting room overnight, really, but done with an efficacy few authors could manage.
10. Doug Lamoureux (2014), Dracula's Demeter - also lent to me by Joel, and read in anticipation of The Last Voyage of the Demeter coming out (not that it has yet officially in the UK, but we did manage to see it!). Again, it paid off, in that there are definite resonances with the film, particularly between the ways the character of Harrington in the book and Clemens in the film come aboard. And on the whole it's a decent enough novel which certainly ties in well with Stoker's. But neither the characterisation of the ship's crew nor the written style is strong enough to deliver the sort of cabin-fever narrative which this story and setting should be able to provide. Also, reading it right after Shadowplay did it no favours by way of contrast! It clearly hadn't even been properly proof-read, with all sorts of spelling errors and weird formatting. Never mind, I was clearly going to have to read it some time anyway, and now I have.