In this centenary year of literature’s greatest, most popular, and best-known vampire novel, Dracula, the superlative short stories of Bram Stoker should not be overlooked. These stories cover an enthrallingly wide range of subject matter, not confined to the ghostly and supernatural, but always bizarre, and some—like “The Squaw” and “The Burial of the Rats”—equal to Poe at his best.
Abraham Stoker (as Bram was christened, after his father, who worked as a government clerk at Dublin Castle) was born on November 8, 1847, at Clontarf, on the eastern side of Dublin. Confined to bed by a debilitating illness during his early childhood, he gradually recovered and grew up to excel in all athletic and academic pursuits, becoming Athletic Champion at Dublin University when he was twenty.
From his youngest days, Stoker always enjoyed writing, and he had some early verses published in Beeton’s Boy’s Own Magazine while he was still in school. His obsession with the preternatural and the gothic dates back to these early years, when he was enthralled by the Irish myths and legends related by his mother, Charlotte, together with stirring accounts from her own childhood.
During the 1870s Stoker spent ten tedious years working for the civil service, and in his spare time he occupied himself as a writer, teacher, and journalist. He submitted several pieces of short fiction to the main London periodicals, but only one was accepted and published at that time: “The Crystal Cup” in London Society for September 1872.
It is tempting to wonder whether this story was admired and recommended directly to the editor by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novella “The Room in the Dragon Volant” had just been serialized in the same magazine from February to June, 1872.
Stoker must have read Le Fanu’s vampire masterpiece, “Carmilla,” as well as “The Haunted House in Westminster,” when they first appeared in Dark Blue (December 1871 to February 1872) and Belgravia (January 1872), respectively; and I am sure that the two must have been acquainted in Dublin while Stoker was both a very active journalist and enthusiastically writing his own short stories—some of which he might have shown to the veteran Irish author. “The Haunted House in Westminster” was retitled “Mr. Justice Harbottle” when it appeared alongside “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” “The Room in the Dragon Volant,” and “Carmilla” in In a Glass Darkly in 1872, and nearly twenty years later it would directly inspire Stoker’s own greatest ghost story, “The Judge’s House.”
Le Fanu died only six months after the publication of “The Crystal Cup,” and any assistance or personal recommendations that Stoker might have received from the great writer perished with him. Stoker was unable to place any more of his stories in London magazines during the rest of this decade (unless some were published anonymously and never credited to him at a later date).
He wrote many pieces, however, for Dublin newspapers and magazines, chiefly editorials and news items for the Irish Echo and the Halfpenny Press, and theatrical notices for the Dublin Mail. With few exceptions, these pieces were unsigned, though his name was usually appended to his occasional tales of fiction.
In 1875, “A. Stoker, Esq.” contributed three serials to the Shamrock, beginning with the ten-chapter novella “The Primrose Path” (February 6—March 6), which emphasized the evils of hard liquor and ended with a grisly murder and suicide. This stirring narrative was followed immediately by “Buried Treasures” (March 13—20) and, six weeks later, “The Chain of Destiny” (May 1—22). This last story, more than the earlier efforts, established Stoker’s favorite themes of curses and villains, set in a spooky gothic house, where an eerie portrait appears and disappears. A character known as “the phantom of the fiend” is the first of Stoker’s truly gothic pre-Dracula figures.
In 1874 Stoker made the first of several visits to Paris, one of his favorite cities and the setting of one of his most memorable horror stories, “The Burial of the Rats,” which includes this passage (referring to 1874): “In this year I was very much in love with a young lady who, though she returned my passion, so far yielded to the wishes of her parents that she had promised not to see me or correspond with me for a year.” This holiday, made en route to see his parents at Clarens, and the subsequent horror story, was recently turned into a movie of the same name, in which Stoker and his father are the leading characters; otherwise the film has very little connection with the tale.
Stoker’s series of weird and fabular allegories for children appeared intermittently in Irish magazines over a six-year period, beginning with “The Castle of the King” in 1876 in the Warder, before being collected as Under the Sunset and published by Sampson Low in a very handsome cream imitation-vellum format in November 1881 (dated 1882). Some of the thirty-three illustrations by William Fitzgerald and W V. Cockburn are quite horrific, notably the depiction of a blood-spattered giant.
There is much hidden symbolism in these eight tales, which were compared by the Spectator to the work of Hans Christian Andersen. The identity of Stoker and his six siblings is subconsciously veiled in “How 7 Went Mad,” and Bram himself appears in one of the illustrations accompanying “The Shadow Builder.” “The Invisible Giant,” describing a ghastly spectral “doom” or plague, was directly inspired by his mother’s experiences when she saw the coming of the cholera epidemic in her youth. The graphic description and illustration of “The Castle of the King,” with its “tall turrets and frowning keep, gateway with cavernous recesses and beetling towers,” is a dead ringer for Dracula’s castle in Transylvania.
The second edition of Under the Sunset, published in the summer of 1882, underwent a radical change, with an increased total of forty-eight illustrations. Of these, twenty-eight had appeared in the first edition, five were redrawn, and fifteen were new. In this second edition, the definition of some plates is sharper, especially that for “The Castle of the King.”
By this time, Stoker had begun his long association with the actor Henry Irving at the Royal Lyceum Theatre in London. He served not only as Irving’s faithful and devoted “acting manager,” but also his most loyal friend, from December 1878 right up to the actor’s death in October 1905. Stoker had been one of Irving’s most ardent fans ever since first seeing him perform as Captain Absolute in The Rivals in 1867.
Ellen Terry, Irving’s most regular co-star at the Lyceum, praised Bram Stoker as “one of the most kind and tender-hearted of men. He filled a difficult position with great tact, and was not so universally abused as most business managers.”
In a 1902 encyclopedia, Stoker is described as
a strong, red Irishman; physically as hard as nails, with a keen eye, and a slightly ferocious expression, possessing, as the manager of a great theatre should, an overflowing amount of energy, and a forty-horse power of work. He accompanies and manages Sir Henry’s tours at home and abroad; supervises every detail, convoys the company across the Atlantic on one steamer while Sir Henry takes his passage on another, manages “the front” of the house, and stands like a buffer between the great actor and all worries inseparable from such a life as his.
In his position at the center of London’s social world, Stoker was ideally placed to submit articles and short stories to magazine editors who were all regular visitors to the Lyceum’s “Beefsteak Room.” One of these was the eminent drama critic Clement Scott, editor of the Theatre magazine during the 1880s, who commissioned a seasonal Christmas story from Stoker in October 1886 for the delectation of all their theatrical friends. The resulting tale, “The Dualitists; or, The Death Doom of the Double Born,” which probably ranks as his most horrifying story, was published by Scott in the Theatre Annual for 1887, and would undoubtedly have been read (if not enjoyed) by his large theatrical fraternity.
One line on the last page—“stakes driven through their middles to pin them down in their unhallowed graves till the Crack of Doom”—is a clear pointer to some of the ideas contained in Dracula ten years later.
Stoker continued to experiment with adult fantasy and horror in a series of very different atmospheric short stories for magazines and Christmas numbers, of which the four best examples all appeared during his most creative period (1890—94): “The Burial of the Rats,” “The Judge’s House” (Holly Leaves, December 5, 1891), “The Secret of the Growing Gold” (Black & White, January 23, 1892), and “The Squaw” (Holly Leaves, December 2, 1893); Holly Leaves was the name given to the Christmas numbers of the very popular British weekly Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News). These last two stories have an exceptionally Poe-like quality in their style. “The Squaw” developed from a visit made by Stoker to Nuremberg ten years earlier—as the narrator teasingly observes: “Nurnberg ... was not so much exploited as it has been since then. Irving had not been playing Faust, and the very name of the old town was hardly known to the great bulk of the travelling public.”
As can be seen in the original manuscripts of “The Secret of the Growing Gold” and the novel Miss Betty (at the Brotherton Collection in Leeds), most of these stories were hurriedly composed on pocket-sized postcards during haphazard breaks from his hectic work at the Lyceum. It is a miracle that he found time to write anything at all during his exhausting daily eighteen-hour schedules; and much of his creative work was reserved for his vacations.
Stoker’s Cruden Bay, a remote little fishing village (which featured a Dracula-style castle) on the east coast of Scotland, became his favorite retreat and escape from the busy theater world; it inspired his novella The Watter’s Mou’ ( 1895), the much longer novel The Mystery of the Sea (1902), and the short tale “Crooken Sands” (Holly Leaves, December 1, 1894). The year 1894 was especially productive for his short fiction, seeing the publication of “The Man from Shorrox” (Pall Mall Magazine, February 1894) and “A Dream of Red Hands” (part of the “Novel in a Nutshell” series in the Sketch, July 11, 1894).
Nearly all of Stoker’s best short stories were written and published during the same seven-year period (1890—97) he spent researching the historical and geographical background of the narrative that would become the definitive vampire novel of all time: Dracula (1897).
Stoker’s first supernatural horror-novel after Dracula was The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), somewhat underrated today, although the original text, with its grim and terrifying climax (modified to a less realistic happy ending in most reprints), appeared in three separate editions in 1996, of which the best is the expertly annotated version published by Desert Island Books.
At the same time Stoker wrote a series of tales comprising “The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party” and published collectively as Snowbound in 1908. “A Star Trap” was the fourteenth of these fifteen tales. (In the text presented here, we have made slight cuts at the beginning and end of the tale so that it can stand as a separate unit rather than as part of an interlinked succession of narratives.) In his preface Stoker cagily stated: “The Truth—or rather Accuracy—of these stories may be accepted or not as the Reader pleases.”
Although he became a much busier and full-time writer in the six years following the death of Sir Henry Irving in 1905, producing several novels, including The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and numerous articles and romantic nonhorrific tales, sadly Stoker wrote no further short stories of the caliber of “The Squaw,” “The Burial of the Rats,” and “The Judge’s House.”
Stoker had begun compiling a collection of his best stories when he died on April 20,1912. The volume eventually appeared in April 1914 under the title Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, with a preface by his widow Florence. Adorned with a splendid colorful dust jacket showing a howling wolf standing on an unconscious man (Jonathan Harker) in a snowbound graveyard, this cheaply priced hardcover volume proved very popular and passed through fourteen printings in twenty years. All the stories from that collection have been reprinted here. “Dracula’s Guest” itself is a seemingly independent tale derived from an early segment omitted from the 1897 novel.
Unsurprisingly, Stephen King is among the numerous genre writers who have recognized and publicly admired Stoker’s genius at creating horror in a capsule form that almost surpasses the excellence of Dracula. In Danse Macabre (1981) King praised these “absolutely champion short stories.... Those who enjoy macabre short fiction could not do better than his collection Dracula’s Guest.”
RICHARD DALBY