Hal Johnson's Blog, page 41

Dracula’s Guest

Dracula originally opened with the adventures of Jonathan Harker as he travels to Dracula’s castle and encounters a beautiful female vampire and a werewolf. This chapter was “excised owing to the length of the book” before publication, but Stoker reworked it into a short story titled “Dracula’s Guest,” starring an unnamed Englishman (Stoker removed the name Harker). Dracula is only mentioned in the second to last paragraph of the story. It was published posthumously in 1914 by Stoker’s wife

Spectral Forensics

Traditionally, when you see a person’s ghost, you also see how the person died. The poet Alexander Pope, in his “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” (1717), asks

What beckoning ghost along the moonlight shade
Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?
’Tis she!—but why that bleeding bosom gored?
Why dimly gleams the visionary sword?

Since the unfortunate lady got stabbed to death, the visionary sword is going to stick out of her ghost forever.

Catch Not the Cuttlefish

We’ve seen (in The Big Book of Monsters) that almost everything Jules Verne or Victor Hugo said about the devilfish is pure hokum. But writers have been making extremely suspect statements about cephalopods—octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—long before Verne or Hugo.

Aelian, in his book, On the Characteristics of Animals (ca. 210 AD), says that if you plant an orchard by the seaside, you’ll find that octopuses “have emerged from the waves, have crept up the trunks, have enveloped the branches,...

Special for Valentine’s Day: A Romantic Interlude

When Robert Louis Stevenson first met Fanny Osbourne, an almost-divorced American vacationing in France with her children, he told his friends he would marry her someday. Osbourne grew to like Stevenson as well, although when she eventually returned to her home in California she must have assumed she would never see the Scottish writer again. But in California, she fell ill, and Stevenson heard about it back in Scotland.

He immediately hopped on a ship for New York. He had almost no money of...

More of Lord Henry Wotton’s Best Quips

“Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.”

“Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.”

“You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.”

“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”

“The...

Guy de Maupassant and the Twist

The French writer Guy de Maupassant is celebrated for his stories with surprising twist endings. His most famous is “The Necklace” (1884), a story about a woman who borrows her rich friend’s gorgeous jeweled necklace for a fancy party. That night she loses the necklace, and out of shame vows to purchase an exact duplicate—her friend will never be the wiser.

In order to afford the diamond-studded replacement, the woman sells everything she owns. It is not nearly enough—she also must borrow...

Pegasus’ Siblings/Medusa’s Children

Medusa’s anatomy was strange enough that from the “gore prolific” flowing from her neck, two creatures sprang: the winged horse Pegasus, and his brother, a guy named Chrysaor who later became king of Spain. Nobody saw that coming,

Pegasus, of course, would be ridden by Bellerophon when they teamed up to kill that terrible monster the Chimera (see p. 127 of The Big Book of Monsters). But Bellerophon was not the only character to ride a fantastic mount. You can find others in:

•Medea by...

Raised by Wolves!

If you believed what you read in books, you’d think the only times wolves stop eating people is when they raise human babies as their own. Three quick examples from the last two thousand years:

•From the Founding of the City by Livy (ca. 10 BC). The ancient historian Livy tried to write a massive book about the complete history of Rome from the very beginning—although the earliest stories of Rome are shrouded in myth. According to legend, the founder of Rome, Romulus, was abandoned as a baby...

A Ghost of Old Japan

According to Sei Shonagon’s great work The Pillow Book (ca. 1000), Fujiwara Sanekata loved dancing at a holiday festival so much his ghost began haunting the dance site after he died. “This story filled me with terror” (Sei Shonagon writes) “and made me determined not to follow his example and become too attached to anything.”

(Meredith McKinney translation; totally used without permission because the internet.)

Speaking of Giants…

In 1899, James D. Gillis wrote The Cape Breton Giant, a biography of Angus MacAskill, the tallest man in Canada. Such an obscure book would be forgotten today, except that Gillis was the worst prose writer in history, and many people have found this book to be so bad that it is hilarious. Gillis quotes poetry on almost every page, whether it is relevant or not. Gillis cannot stay on topic. Gillis never writes a simple sentence when he he the opportunity to write a confusing one. This is how...