The Green Book, book 20Brian J. Showers

With this issue, we offer another ten profiles of Irish writers of gothic, supernatural, and fantastic fiction. The two most notable writers this issue—and therefore lengthiest entries—are, of course, Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906) and Bram Stoker (1847-1912). Along with names like Charles Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and Lord Dunsany, Riddell and Stoker might be considered pillars of Irish fiction. It might even be said that Dracula (1897), for better or for worse, is a key text of world literature and beyond. After all, who would not recognise the Lugosi-inflected visage of Stoker’s infamous Count?

John Edgar Browning has shown in A Critical Feast (2012) that Dracula was a hit from the start, when it first landed on booksellers’ shelves in late May of 1897. But Stoker’s magnum opus really took on a life of its own when it transitioned to other media. Dracula’s early rise in popular culture is most thoroughly traced in David J. Skal’s Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen (1990).