In honor of Halloween, I pulled two collections of Bram Stoker's short fiction off the shelf. Dracula may be ubiquitous in contemporary Victorian studies--the editor of one journal told me that they were receiving more submissions on that novel than on any other--but I've never had much enthusiasm for it; while its narrative structure is undoubtedly complex, its prose nevertheless strikes me as overwrought and, in general, overdone. Shorter Stoker, however, does have something to recommend it. Like many Victorian horror writers, Stoker relies heavily on the clash between rational observers and irrational happenings, with the latter often destroying the former; if the supernatural gives way, it does so not to reason, but to Christian faith (as in "The Chain of Destiny"). Two comic stories are remarkably "modern" in their subjects: "A Criminal Star" gleefully sends up the cult of celebrity, while "Crooken Sands" takes aim at the "invented tradition" of the Scottish tartan. In both stories, the horrors (or narrowly averted horrors) derive from human egotism instead of the supernatural. As Henry Irving's manager, Stoker spent a good deal of time in America, and Americans pop up in a number of stories--most gruesomely in the vaguely Poesque "The Squaw," featuring a black cat who takes revenge on the American who accidentally kills her kitten. The genuinely "eeeuugh"-inducing ending features an Iron Maiden. ("The Squaw" refers simultaneously to an Indian woman who revenges herself horribly on the killer of her child, the cat, and the Iron Maiden itself.) "Midnight Tales," an incomplete sequence of short-shorts, ends on a note of macabre humor that wouldn't seem out of place in something by Edward Gorey. Although it's only intermittently successful, "The Secret of the Growing Gold" uses the same device--a man haunted by a spurned woman's hair--later deployed to great effect in the "Black Hair" episode of the classic Japanese horror film Kwaidan (based on the short stories of Lafcadio Hearn). Far spookier is "The Judge's House," which nevertheless seems dangerously close in subject and execution to J. S. LeFanu's "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street." (Then again, it's quite possible that Stoker intends us to recognize the similarities; certainly, this time around, the outcome is not so happy for the protagonist.)
By far the best story, however, is "The Dualitists; or, the Death Doom of the Double Born," which in tone is reminiscent of--wait for it--Damon Runyon's "Sense of Humor." Yes, that Damon Runyon. "Sense of Humor" derives its bite from the contrast between the narrator's wryly detached tone and Joe the Joker's increasingly dangerous "humor"; the story's payoff packs a genuinely sharp punch, precisely because the narrator never wavers in his attitude to Joe's behavior. Similarly, "The Dualitists," written in engagingly mock-heroic mode ("All the poets from Hyginus to Schiller might sing of noble deeds done and desperate dangers held as naught for friendship's sake, but they would have been mute had they but known of the mutual affection of Harry and Tommy"), tells the story of two young psychopaths with murderously inappropriate comic verve. After Ephraim Bubb accidentally murders his own children in an attempt to save them from the depradations of Harry and Tommy, both he and his wife inadvertently die when they try to catch the corpses:
But the weight of the bodies and the height from which they fell were not reckoned by either parent, and from being ignorant of a simple dynamical formula each tried to effect an object which calm, common sense, united with scientific knowledge, would have told them was impossible. The masses fell, and Ephraim and Sophonisba were stricken dead by the falling twins, who were thus posthumously guilty of the crime of parricide.
The narrator's calm reflections on physics, the need for "common sense," and, of course, justice, intrude at just the right moment. It's a wonderful example of black humor, and shows a far greater sense of style than anything in Dracula.
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