Review
Miller's book is less what it proclaims itself - a common-sensical overview of Bram Stoker's Dracula - than the latest bitter exchange between the warring camps of 'Draculites' (Dracula scholars). On the one side ('our side', if you're reading this book) is the camp led by Clive Leatherdale, who has devoted most of his adult life to grappling with Stoker's 'multifaceted meanings'. Leatherdale, among his many books, is the author of Dracula Unearthed, which has some 3000 learned annotations. On the other side are 'two Boston history professors', Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally, authors of a string of books on the subject, most authoritatively, The Essential Dracula. Miller confesses herself a 'johnny come-lately' to the study of Dracula, as over a period of 10 years she has written only two books on the subject. She writes very much under Generalissimo Leatherhead's wing (the book is published in his delightfully named, 'Desert Island Dracula Library'). If one accepts that Dracula really is a text of Shakespearean (nay, Biblical) significance, there is much that is salutary in Miller's book. We are instructed, for example, that the resonant word 'nosferatu' means absolutely nothing in Romanian or any other language. Dracula does not put his fangs to the necks of men. He's a very heterosexual bloodsucker. Nor is he harmed by sunlight - merely enervated. And so on. Frankly, I loved the nits picked in this volume. Review by JOHN SUTHERLAND Editor's note: John Sutherland's Henry V, War Criminal? was reviewed in the May Guide. (Kirkus UK)
