I received these two volumes of graphic adaptations of M.R. James ghost stories for Christmas, and had read both before the end of Boxing Day. John Reppion, one half of the production team, spoke about how he and Leah Moore had approached the stories and showed us some of the artwork from them at the M.R. James conference I went to in York in late ( Read more... )

Since the two books I read before this one had been awful and disappointing respectively, I turned to this one for a reasonably-guaranteed good read. That's the advantage of literary classics - people are likely to have kept reading and recommending them for a reason, so you're on safer ground than with something new and untried. This one was lent ( Read more... )

This novel was written by two sisters, of whom the elder, Emily Gerard, was a Polish cavalry officer's wife and spent time living in the Transylvanian Romanian towns of Sibiu and Brașov where he was stationed. It's well known in Dracula circles that she used that time to research an article and book on Transylvania which were used in turn by Bram ( Read more... )

This book was my response to the 'Doesn't belong to me' prompt when I did the book a day meme back in June. I hadn't actually read it yet at that point, but had spotted it on my Dad's bookshelves, and felt it deserved to be read in this year of all years. The cover looks like this, and was at once promising and off-putting:


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Back in April I got a request via a friend who works in the British Library to translate a few words and sentences into Latin for Ben Aaronovitch's latest Rivers of London book ( LJ / DW). I knew squat all about the series then, but agreed to the assignment and, with help from a couple of colleagues, supplied the requisite text. A few weeks later, a ( Read more... )

This book is obviously exceptionally relevant to my interests! The main body works its way through each of the sixteen vampire films made by Hammer from the 1950s to '70s, covering the production process for each one followed by commentary on the story itself, its themes and its cultural resonances. It also sets the Hammer films themselves into the ( Read more... )

This book presents a transcript of and commentary on a journal kept by Bram Stoker between 1871 and 1882, which was left by his wife Florence to their son Noel, and passed down from him to Noel Dobbs, Bram's great-grandson, who lives today on the Isle of Wight. It was clearly more of a commonplace book or writer's notebook than a personal diary of ( Read more... )

This is a novelisation of the Hammer film Brides of Dracula (1960), which is bloody great and which I've reviewed in its own right here: LJ / DW. I've read and reviewed two other Hammer Dracula novelisations before - John Burke (1967), Dracula, Prince of Darkness ( LJ / DW) and Angus Hall (1971), Scars of Dracula ( LJ / DW) - and from comparing the ( Read more... )

This is short story collection subtitled 'A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories' which I bagged for a bargain price at the Dracula Society auction in Whitby last autumn (LJ / DW). It basically aims to trace the evolution of vampire mythology, mainly in fiction but also in accounts of real folk beliefs, up to the point when Dracula ( Read more... )

This book is at once excellent and infuriating.

Excellent because it is very well-researched and bang up to date on all the latest Stoker-related discoveries (e.g. Makt Myrkranna, though news of Mörkrets Makter came post-publication). For me it was particularly valuable as a research resource for my Classical references in Dracula paper. I knew ( Read more... )