Dracula: The Connoisseur's Guide

Dracula scholar Wolf (The Essential Dracula) brings intellectual curiosity and an easygoing style to this entertaining compendium of Dracula lore, which will appeal equally to devotees and the uninitiated. Beginning with an examination of blood rituals and taboos, a survey of vampire folklore from Bulgaria to China and a review of the biology of vampire bats, he goes on to discuss Bram Stoker's 1897 cult novel, Dracula, and its roots in gothic fiction, in the gory deeds of Vlad the Impaler, 15th-century mass murderer and prince of Wallachia; and in Stoker's repression of his alleged homosexuality. Wolf disputes the suggestion of Stoker's most recent biographer, Barbara Belford, that Dracula is a sinister caricature of the Dublin novelist's unacknowledged love interest, actor Henry Irving, yet Wolf maintains that Stoker poured all the pain and confusion of his repressed feelings into his one masterpiece. This guidebook decodes the symbolism and eroticism of Dracula movies from F.W. Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu to Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 Bram Stoker's Dracula. Wolf also scans the vampire fiction of Stephen King and Anne Rice, and investigates Dracula's multiple meanings in pop culture. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) FYI: Leonard Wolf's daughter, Naomi, has a new book due out in June from Random House.