![]() Made up of letters, diaries, recordings and newspaper clippings. The method in which the novel is told, is through the lens of various storytellers. In fact, I was shocked to find that the novel Dracula was more faithfully retold, though updated, in 1985s Fright Night than it is in 1931’s Dracula! Though granted, most film incarnations seem to portray a more handsome Dracula than that of the novel. The tenacity of human will and the monstrosities of what we don’t understand. What I came to understand however, was a story surrounding how far men will go for the people they love. Complete with a monstrous man who grew young, and a trio of female vampires by his side. In my mind, and through cultural osmosis, I had concocted an image in my mind of a bloody horror story. And while I thought I knew the story of Dracula, partly through movies and partly through a vague memory of reading it. Bloodlust, a season dedicated to Vampires in cinema, curated by Danny Graydon. In 2016, I acted as the projectionist for the University of Hertfordshire’s second film season. Though I have never bothered to sit through the Twilight collection. In the end, there was only one clear choice. I started with a list and the more I thought, the longer it became. Really takes the edge off of a dull day.Ĭhoosing a book is perhaps the hardest. Manual labour, exercising, cleaning, etc. What I have greatly enjoyed about this exercise so far, is how the use of audio books have made some of the more mundane acts of life more bearable. The majority of this undertaking has come through the use of audiobooks while I work, though with prose copies on hand to re-read certain sections either for clarification or just to refresh my memory. We got Much Ado About Nothing, they got the more traditional Romeo and Juliet. ![]() Several of these are books that were issued to read in high school, but went to class B rather than my own. The prospect of being caught up in a creature’s tentacles is bad enough, but when those tentacles seem to be made of pure fire, the thought is even more terror-inducing.Current efforts to better educate myself in the world of literature have led me to explore all the books I either missed, have always meant to read, or never finished. A Balrog carries Gandalf down into the depths in the Mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings, although other Balrogs turn up in The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s life’s work which builds up the mythology of Middle-Earth. We’ll conclude this list of fictional monsters with another from Tolkien’s work: the Balrog, the tall, fearsome being with fiery whip-like tentacles. We had to include one dragon on this list, and although this one may not be the most fearsome dragon in all of literature and myth, Smaug has become one of the most famous. Smaug is the dragon that guards the hoard of treasure that Bilbo Baggins, and the party of dwarves, go off in search of in Tolkien’s original story, The Hobbit (1937), a novel we have analysed in more detail here.ĭrawing on his intensive knowledge of Nordic folklore, Tolkien made a children’s story (that also stands up to being reread in adulthood) out of centuries-old legend. Let’s conclude with a couple of the best-known monsters from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Now it’s readily available again, and well worth reading, not least for its horrific title character. The Beetle, written by ‘Richard Marsh’, was initially more popular than Stoker’s creation when it was published in 1897, although that soon changed, and the novel was long-forgotten and out of print. Seen by Jonathan Harker climbing the walls of his castle in Transylvania, Dracula can transform himself into bat and human at will.Īnother fictional shape-shifter who made their debut in print in 1897, the Beetle is a female entity, born of the cult of Isis (no relation), who can be both beetle and human, and who arrives in the city of London hell-bent on exacting a terrible revenge upon a British politician. Dracula, however, was a richer and more complex creation than most, fusing the history of the fifteenth-century ruler Vlad the Impaler with folklore and contemporary fears surrounding ‘the Other’ as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Dracula needs little introduction, although it’s worth pointing out that vampire fiction in Britain was well-established by the time the Irish-born Bram Stoker published his famous novel in 1897.
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