Thursday 26 March 2015

GREAT GHOSTS OF THE SHELVES #02 - Dracula's Guest by Bram Stoker


A paperback edition from 1966 from Arrow Books of a collection of weird tales by Bram Stoker, first published in 1914. Stoker is of course best remembered as the creator of Dracula, but he also wrote several other novels and a great many cracking short tales. This volume of strange thrills features some of the best, collecting together several tales that had previously appeared in magazines alongside some that  had never been published before. It includes -

Dracula's Guest (1914)
The Judge's House (1891)
The Squaw (1893)
The Secret of the Growing Gold (1892)
A Gipsy Prophecy (1914)
The Coming of Abel Behenna (1914)
The Burial of the Rats (1914)
A Dream of Red Hands (1894)
Crooken Sands (1894)

Dracula's Guest is famously a tale closely connected to his masterwork, indeed an eerie adventure for Jonathan Harker which was cut from the original novel. But there's more to this volume than just vampires, The Judge's House is a wonderfully sinister tale and The Squaw is a fantastic story about the infamous iron maiden, and both have appeared in many other anthologies. And there's many treasures in the lesser known stories here too, with The Burial of the Rats being my top tip for an undiscovered gem. 

A reading of Dracula's Guest by Mr Jim Moon can be found here

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