Bram Stoker and the Man Who Was Dracula
Barbara Belford
ISBN: 0306810980
Publisher: DaCapo Press
Pub. Date: February 5, 2002

Synopsis:
New in paperback: The story of the mind behind the monster (and the monster within the mind)-a tale of obsession and hero worship in Victorian England. "What a splendid subject to sink one's teeth into," raved the Washington Post. Here was a six-foot-two Irishman with a red beard-a Victorian family man, a spirited debater, and the author of novels and short stories largely forgotten today. All, of course, except for Dracula, which has enjoyed countless stage and screen incarnations and transformations and haunted the dreams of many generations. Bram Stoker lived at the very center of late-Victorian social and artistic life and numbered among his friends Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Whistler, Gladstone, and Tennyson. But it was his relationship with the mesmerizing, domineering actor Henry Irving that may have played the most crucial role in Stoker's life-a real-life monster who ultimately led to Stoker's most famous creation. In this book that the Baltimore Sun called "superb," Barbara Belford draws on unpublished archival material to reveal the links between the reticent author's life, his vampire tale, and the political, occult, cultural, and sexual background of the 1890's.

Synopsis:
The vampire has haunted the myths of people on virtually every continent. It has filled the pages of writers from the time of Homer to the era of the medieval chroniclers, to the Gothic works of Byron and Le Fanu. Today, the vampire is alive and flourishing, and has assumed new incarnations on stage, screen, and TV, as well as in novels and even comic books. In more than 2,000 entries from Hecate to Hematomania, Lycanthropy to Lugosi, Mirrors to Montenegro, The Vampire Encyclopedia covers in detail such subjects as the history of the vapire legend; methods of finding, identifying, and destroying vampires; the origin and meaning of the accepted ways of resisiting vampires; the ways in which one can become a vampire; the importance of blood in vapiric lore; the role of the vampire bat; and the psychological-medical views on vampirism.