Hollywood gothic

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.--From publisher description.

First sentence: IN THE RARE BOOKS ROOM OF A SMALL LIBRARY ON A TREE-LINED street in Philadelphia is a leather slipcase containing a sheaf of mounted note cards, almost a century old but not yellowing-they are an exceptionally high grade of linen stock, the property of Henry Irving's prestigious Royal Lyceum Theatre in London.

Year

1990

Language

English

Publisher

Faber and Faber

Editions

4

Pages

370

ISBN

9780571211586

Data source: Wikidata