284 pp. Light olive cloth, black titles with bats on front board. Stoker's works are the literary cornerstore of our cultural understanding of the mythology of vampires. The status of Dracula's Guest is a source of disagreement among scholars: some believe it was originally intended as the first chapter of Dracula, but excised from the final work; others that it was based on notes related to that work's first few chapters. Though the setting is Munich - not Transylvania - the unnamed protagonist may yet be Jonathan Harker. It was originally released in 1914 at the behest of Stoker's widow two years after his death as part of the collection Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories. It was not published in the United States until nearly 25 years later, in the edition offered here, which preserves the same contents but changes the order of the stories. Includes: Preface by Florence Stoker; Dracula's Guest; The Judge's House; The Burial of the Rats; The Squaw; The Secret of the Growing Gold; The Coming of Abel Behenna; Crooken Sands; A Dream of Red Hands; A Gypsy Prophecy. Though David Selznick bought the film rights in 1933, the motion picture he released in 1936 under the title Dracula's Daughter bears no resemblance to the Dracula story included here. While the rest of the volume's stories do not feature vampires, they are grim and sometimes gruesome horror stories in their own right, and an interesting foil for the much different style of Dracula, which was an epistolary novel.
