The Borgo Cast - The Intersections of Dracula

When Dracula was first published, many reviewers drew connections between that novel and an earlier work by friend and collaborator of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins. The novel was The Woman in White. Is this connection legitimate? Is it required reading for Dracula fans? Tune in and find out!

I need experts this week. Stevo the Gutternerd  is here to tell me about a Dracula media franchise that I know nothing about. Listen as I talk video game and Castlevania!

Follow Steve: https://twitter.com/GutterNerds

Here we go, with the biggest literary hitter of the cast, the novel Dracula!

Dracula Lives..ahem...for the First Time!

So when it comes to big subject like this, Dustin needs help, and help he finds from friends of network Courtney Oliphant and Heather Johnson. Courtney of Chicks with Flicks fame and Heather currently of Gal N Kitten Knitten' fame are both amazing people. Not only do they have things to say about muscled guys with machine guns the the distinctions between knitting and crochet, they also are Dracula experts! I'm lucky to have them on the show it the best one so far.

In case you didn't know the novel, according to wikipededia:

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. It introduced Count Dracula, and established many conventions of subsequent vampire fantasy. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and a woman led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

It's the one that started it all and here we go deep into the fray.

Carmilla is an amazing novella! According to Wikipedia: Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 26 years. First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871–72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). The story is often anthologized and has been adapted many times in film and other media.

There are lots of vampire tropes to be found in this great little book. We've got the remarkable likeness to an old painting. There's the stake through the heart. We have bathing in blood and anagrams. Tons of anagrams. 

That being said, the story itself is actually a plot (not style) that is what I consider superior to Dracula. That's right, this is a better vampire story in my opinion. I found it very readable and now one of my favorite vampire tales.

Thanks for tuning and don't forget we tackle the big daddy novel, Dracula next week.  

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And we are back! This week I review Varney the Vampire Volume 1. 

We are continuing with a quick review of the English literature developments of the vampire narrative leading to Stoker's masterpiece. This week we cover the serialized Penny Dreadful, Varney the Vampire Volume 1. This version, though all of them are in the public domain is a three volume version of the series. It is broken into volumes because the entire run of the story is in fact, 800 pages + long. It's massive! 

Here's a brief summary from Wikipedia:

Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood is a Victorian era serialized gothic horror story variously attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett [or Preskett] Prest. It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls". The author was paid by the typeset line so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.

Despite its inconsistencies, Varney the Vampire is more or less a cohesive whole. It is the tale of the vampire Sir Francis Varney, and introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences. It was the first story to refer to sharpened teeth for a vampire, noting “With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth.”

In my review we summarize the plot of the first volume, examine the characters and finally evaluate the novel's place in vampire lore.

I conclude by asking you dear listener, if you want more Varney in the future. I am certainly game to do more, but this particular book, likely due to it's length, does not get a lot of attention.