Dracula and Dracula's Guest -

Dracula and Dracula's Guest - Abraham ("Bram") Stoker Should Dracula's Guest be considered a missing chapter from Dracula, or a short story in its own right? The research conducted by this writer indicates that Dracula's Guest is a "missing chapter" from Dracula, and by virtue of its stand-alone situation, it has also become a generally well-received short story in its own right.

I don't mean to duck the assigned question (either or), so this is not opinion; the literary and historic facts cry out for the truth, and the truth is, myriad sources indicate it was excised from the original manuscript. And yet there it is as a paperback on Amazon.com and on other book-selling sites. Technically then, Dracula's Guest is both absent from the novel, and is a short story.

For the purposes of this paper, it will be seen as a short story on it's own merits, but the editorial and technical circumstances of Dracula's Guest are certainly germane to any discussion of Bram Stoker, and his wife. Meanwhile, on page 1 of the paperback Dracula's Guest (Kessinger Publishing 2004), under the title, Dracula's Guest, is the following: "Note: DRACULA'S GUEST was excised from the original DRACULA MSS by his publisher because of the length of the original book MSS.

It was published as a short story in 1914, two years after Stoker's death. Enjoy!" It should also be mentioned that Dracula's Guest is not only a short story, but in Amazon.com's Kessinger publication, mentioned in the paragraph above, Dracula's Guest is a book of short stories by Stoker. There are 8 short stories in addition to Dracula's Guest in the book.

In the e-book version of the short story, Dracula's Guest (www.classic-literature.co.uk),the online publisher provides a Preface attributed to the pen of Bram Stoker's wife, Florence Bram Stoker (which is seen frequently during research on the issue at hand); it is as follows: few months before the lamented death of my husband -- I might say even as the shadow of death was over him -- he planned three series of short stories for publication, and the present volume is one of them.

To his original list of stories in this book, I have added an hitherto unpublished episode from Dracula. It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband's most remarkable work. The other stories have already been published in English and American periodicals. Had my husband lived longer, he might have seen fit to revise this work, which is mainly from the earlier years of his strenuous life.

But, as fate has entrusted to me the issuing of it, I consider it fitting and proper to let it go forth practically as it was left by him." FLORENCE BRAM STOKER Having provided reasonably solid evidence that Dracula's Guest was omitted from the author's book Dracula, albeit the specific reasons why it was omitted are elusive, it is a strategy worth pursuing to review approaches to the short story in juxtaposition with the novel itself, to see how it may have fit in.

The story is worthy, although not as sexy nor as dramatic as the novel. While it sets the tone for the novel, it certainly is breathlessly frightening on its own. In some critical reviews of Dracula and Dracula's Guest, scholars and academics have been less than exuberant in their praise of the works, although there are clues in older reviews that provide possible answers as to why Dracula's Guest was dropped from the original manuscript.

Critic Montague Summers, writing in 1928, states that when the book Dracula is viewed "from a purely literary point of approach, it must be acknowledged that there is much careless writing..." (Summers 1928). [Is it possible that what Summers saw as "careless" was actually due to the epistolary - diary entries, telegrams, etc.

- structure of the novel? There are many pages, Summers continued, that "...could have been compressed and something revised with considerable profit." Moreover, though the characters tend to be "labels rather than individuals," Summers asserts, "there are passage of graphic beauty, passages of graphic horror, but these...almost entirely occur within the first sixty pages." If it is true that the best passages of Dracula are found in the early portions of the book, it would make sense that the first chapter (or was it to be the second?), which later became the short story, was not necessary.

Perhaps the publisher / editor who handled the manuscript saw the chapter (short story) as overkill (no pun), since the provocative in-your-face un-Victorian themes were so potent there was little need for an additional chapter that stood well on its own. In terms of that fact that some of the smoothest, most ambitiously graphic narrative was already in the succeeding chapters, it may have been a coldly objective decision to hold the "prefatory chapter" back for later publication. Critic James B.

Twitchell writes (Twitchell 1985) that Dracula's Guest is "...One of the best werewolf stories ever written." Initially believed to have been intended as the first chapter of Dracula, Twitchell explains, following the discovery of the Dracula manuscript in 1984 "...arguments against Dracula's Guest being a missing first chapter were marshaled." Almost no one today (in literary circles) believes that Dracula's Guest "...was all or part of material removed from the manuscript as it was readied for publication..

[it seems to have] only a vague relationship to the novel." In Dracula's Guest - which today is a respected work on its own, and contains all the salient ingredients to make it a legitimate short story - amazing things happen to Jonathan Harker in third, who finds himself stranded when his driver refuses to continue, and finds refuge in, of all places, a mausoleum.

There are lines in this short story that rival (but do not necessarily surpass) Edgar Allen Poe's best efforts; "...Her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash"; "...this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they must have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers"; "...I remembered...a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the p phantoms of their sheeted dead...closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail." To his credit, Stoker was genius in this tale of intertwining violent weather with hideous ghostly images." Critic Brian Stableford writes that even when Stoker got "to the point.