Book cover: "A Dream of Dracula" — plus other vampire stuff

• Title: A Dream of Dracula
• Subtitle: In Search of the Living Dead
• Author: Leonard Wolf (1923-2019). He was featured in a 2023 Papergreat post about another book of his: 1968's Voices from the Love Generation.
• Dust jacket design: John Renfer, using a 1941 photo that's copyrighted by RKO Pictures.
• Publication date: 1972
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 327
• Dust jacket price: $8.95 (which would a steep $67 in February 2025, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics)
• Dedication: "This book is dedicated Bram Stoker on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the birth of DRACULA."
• Excerpt #1: "Meanwhile, somewhere in that field of desire and Coca-Colas, hashish, LSD and old-fashioned, ordinary picnic pleasure, a child is born." [Wolf is writing about the Altamont Free Concert of 1969.]
• Excerpt #2: "Dracula is from the moment that we meet him in Bram Stoker's novel a dry horror, which is a way of saying that he is intelligent evil, unlike the wet, slime-covered things that slide through our instinctive dreams."
• Excerpt #3: "Vampires have even been reported in Outer Mongolia. And if Hollywood is any prophet, they will be found waiting for mankind on planets where our rocket ships have not yet landed."
• Excerpt #4: "Christopher Lee is the best and most famous screen Dracula since Bela Lugosi. I sat in his London living room, which felt as if all of its mirrors, couches, tables and walls had been dipped into a tasteful sea-green dye. Lee had the color television on and was watching an important cricket match. ... He spoke more or less nonstop, in a rich but curiously charged voice. It was at once evident that he took the role of Dracula with great seriousness and had read all about Stoker and the folklore of vampires. He had very clear opinions about his relationship to the role. He pointed out that he had nothing to do with the scripts of the films he made."
• Excerpt #5: "Dracula, then, is a novel that lurches toward greatness, stumbling over perceived and unperceived mysteries: Christianity, insanity, identity, a spectrum of incest possibilities, marriage, homosexuality, immortality and death." 
• Excerpt #6: "The vampire fascinates a century that is as much frightened as it is exhilarated by its rush toward sexual freedom. ... He kiss permits all unions. ... Moreover, his is an easy love that evades the usual failures of the flesh. ... And it stands for death."   
• Rating on Goodreads: 3.68 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review: In 2014, Aric Cushing summed it up thusly: "A personal journey through a landscape of childhood dreams, melancholy, and vampire sentiment."
• Rating on Amazon: 4.1 stars (out of 5) 
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2004, mirasreviews wrote: "'A Dream of Dracula' is a meditation on the novel 'Dracula' and its 20th century progeny — literary, cultural, and personal — published on the 75th anniversary of Bram Stoker's novel, in 1972. A few years later, author Leonard Wolf would publish the most elaborately annotated version of 'Dracula.' Wolf is one of the world's foremost 'Dracula' scholars, but the novel has touched him more intimately than other academics. 'A Dream of Dracula' is a collection of ruminations on 'Dracula,' vampires, blood, and death, often is a stream of conscious style, all connected, directly or loosely, to the 19th century gothic novel whose popularity is set to survive longer than even its vampiric villain did. The book's ten chapters weave in and out of the past and present."
• Other views: The book is discussed by "Tinhuviel Artanis" in a 2006 LiveJournal post: "This is ... one of the best books on the subject of vampires, vampirism, the folklore of the the vampire, and the vampire's influence on popular culture. Published in 1972, it has that air of revolution, the quest for freedom, and the celebration of the absurd wrapped neatly in its poetry." ... And Alex Bledsoe wrote about Wolf's book on his blog, stating: "Wolf was actually born in Transylvania, and the book is a dive into both the legend of Dracula in popular culture, and into the psyche of Leonard Wolf. One is obviously more interesting now than the other, but even the personal asides and extended vignettes have their entertainment value. Wolf was writing at the end of the Sixties, so some of his interviewees actually use phrases like, 'groovy' and 'turned on.'"

But wait, there's more

I've been keeping some vampiric tidbits tucked away, but they'll never make their own standalone post, so I'm posting them here:

A 2023 tweet:

Mark Hodgson of the website Black Hole wrote in 2014 about 1921's Drakula halála, a now-lost film that predates Nosferatu as an adaptation of Stoker's novel. Hodgson writes: "While the plot doesn't follow Stoker's novel, many situations are familiar from it. Dracula's immortality, his castle, his brides, Mary's suffering health after meeting him, the asylum ... possibly the story elements were juggled to dodge any copyright issue?"

Also in 2014, Hodgson wrote a fun post on Black Hole about visiting Bela Lugosi's former home.

And speaking of Lugosi, here's a photo I took recently of a Lugosi life mask mounted on the wall at Terror Trader, an amazeballs horror-themed store in Chandler, Arizona.