Howdy! Or How do? as we say round here. (You can also use 'Awreet?')
The answer in case you wondered is: Champion! So, this is the first edition of what I hope will become an informative and entertaining newsletter. Get a mailing list they said. What do I do with it? I asked. This, it seems, fits the bill.
This is going to have a few sections: an analysis of a story, a recommendation, a 'from the shadows' and a final tie-up. Let's get started.
Analysis: Dracula and the Anxious Victorians
Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. It has never been out of print. Most horror novels of that period have not survived as living texts — they exist in academic editions and specialist collections and that's it. Dracula is still read by ordinary people who simply want to read it.
Part of the explanation is structural. Stoker tells the story entirely through documents — journals, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, a phonograph transcript. There is no omniscient narrator standing outside events and explaining them. The reader pieces the story together from partial, subjective accounts written by people who don't yet fully understand what they're dealing with. It creates a specific kind of tension that a conventional third-person narrative wouldn't produce. For 1897 it's an unusually sophisticated technique.
But structure alone doesn't explain the novel's persistence. The deeper reason is that Dracula is built from the anxieties of its moment, and those anxieties have not entirely dated.
The 1890s in England were a period of considerable unease. Darwin had been dismantling the certainties of religious belief for forty years. The British Empire was at its height but generating uncomfortable questions about what empire actually meant and what it brought home with it. The role of women in society was being openly contested. Science was moving faster than culture could absorb.
Stoker took all of this and embodied it in a single figure.
Dracula arrives in England from Eastern Europe uninvited. He is the foreign threat coming not to be governed but to feed on the host culture. This is what scholars call reverse colonisation — the empire's subjects arriving in the imperial centre and taking what they want. Whether Stoker consciously intended this reading is debatable. That it's structurally present in the novel is not.
The sexual dimension is equally deliberate. When Lucy Westenra becomes a vampire she becomes sexually aggressive in a way that Victorian propriety found deeply transgressive. The men around her are horrified. They are also, plainly, fascinated (most of them want to marry her...) Stoker was not naive about what he was writing.
What gives the novel its particular texture is the way Stoker grounds these archaic fears in contemporary technology. The characters who hunt Dracula use telegrams, typewriters, train timetables and the latest medical knowledge. They are thoroughly modern people fighting something ancient. That tension — rationalism against superstition, the contemporary against the medieval — runs through the whole novel and is never fully resolved in the way a tidier book might resolve it.
Stoker's background is relevant here. He was Irish, formed in Dublin, and worked as a theatre critic for a newspaper co-owned by Sheridan Le Fanu — the Irish gothic writer who produced Carmilla, a female vampire story, decades before Dracula. He spent nearly thirty years managing Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre, absorbing dramatic technique and the mechanics of spectacle. He visited Whitby (like me!) repeatedly and was clearly affected by it — the ruined clifftop abbey, the North Sea, the local atmosphere of shipwrecks and old stories.
Dracula is assembled from those ingredients. Irish gothic, theatrical structure, coastal atmosphere, Victorian anxiety. That's why it carries more weight than a simpler horror novel would.
The Book I'm Recommending
Lost in the Garden by Adam Leslie
For anyone old enough to remember 1976 — the summer that never ended, the lawns burned brown, the standpipes, the sense that England had somehow slipped sideways into a permanent golden elsewhere — Adam S. Leslie's Lost in the Garden will feel like a door opening into something half remembered.
It's set in an England where the dead have returned. But Leslie isn't interested in apocalypse in any conventional sense. The dead are slow and confused and murderous, but the living simply carry on around them. Ice cream vans still move through the streets. People still go to the pub. The horror has become ambient, part of the weather, and the weather is that 1976 summer, endlessly repeated, golden and oppressive and faintly wrong in a way you can feel but not name.
The novel follows a group of friends drifting by road toward a village called Almanby. The journey has the logic of a dream — identities slip, the landscape watches, the past and present blur into each other on long straight roads through flat Lincolnshire countryside. Leslie grew up there between an Anglo-Saxon burial mound and a Cold War transmitter. That layered, haunted geography is on every page.
For much of its length the novel drifts and accumulates without releasing pressure. This is not a flaw. Leslie is working in the register of myth rather than plot, and myths don't hurry toward their conclusions. When Almanby arrives it arrives with genuine weight because he has spent three hundred pages earning it.
This is folk horror rooted in the English weird tradition — ancient things pressing through into the present, the land itself as something with intentions. But underneath all of that it is also a book about what we do with the summers we can never quite leave behind.
From the Shadows
A reader who grew up in Asia as an expat left a comment on a piece I wrote about timeslips for Medium some years ago. I've thought about her account many times since. I'm going to let her tell it in her own words because I couldn't improve on them.
"As we walked up the hill towards the cathedral and castle I continually felt as though I had been to Lincoln before. We walked into the cathedral and about a minute after we entered the main nave I turned to look behind me and as I did so the lighting inside dimmed to smoky candles, all the benches had disappeared, completely replaced by dirt floors, heavy incense and smoke, a few flagstones down the middle of the main walkway, and only a few people were there but wearing vastly different clothing from anything I had ever seen before. I turned saying to my husband 'can you see this' but he wasn't where he was, and by the time I turned around he was there and everything was back to normal. I was covered in goosebumps and had to sit down."
A few hours later, after lunch — she notes with dry honesty that it's amazing what you try to explain away — they entered Lincoln Castle and went up to the ramparts.
"On one of the open towers there was a tall wooden structure with crossbeams and a wooden platform that wasn't there when we first came up. There was a hell of a noise like people shouting coming from outside the castle and two men lugging what looked like a very dead man between them with another two still on the wooden structure. I turned to grab my husband's arm because my legs went really weak and then looked back to find the structure gone and the area full of tourists again. I can describe each man I saw."
The following day they joined one of the city's ghost tours (like me!). The guide stopped the group on the ground beneath that tower and told them that from the Middle Ages until the early nineteenth century the city gallows and executioner's block stood there.
She didn't know that when she saw the men and the wooden structure. She found out the next day.
Meanwhile at Home
I've been reading Grady Hendrix's The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires – and enjoying it. The opening is excellent. Hendrix has a sharp eye for the domestic realities of suburban life in the American South, and for the first third it reads like Southern Gothic of a high order, grounded and socially observed. Then it becomes something closer to Salem's Lot, which is not a complaint. I'll review it properly in a future issue when I've finished it.
Otherwise life here in Cumbria involves walking the dogs along the river at Wetheral with Sheila, yoga, the gym, and the eternal question of how a person who writes about death and the supernatural ends up living somewhere this quietly beautiful. Easy. I was born here.
I'm also taking part in a book event in Carlisle soon where I'll be selling my books. Ah, yes selling my books :) Here are some links!
To buy my paperback books:
https://books.by/tony-walker-books
To buy my ebooks and audiobooks:
payhip.com/TheClassicGhostStoriesPodcast
Until the next issue.
Tony
