Bram Stoker despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula has remained an enigma.
David J. Skal in a psychological and cultural portrait exhumes the inner world and strange
genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralysed
as a boy and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors:
fever opium abuse bloodletting quack cures and the obsession with bad blood that inform
every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with
Oscar Wilde who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelgänger worthy of a Gothic
novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with Walt Whitman his punishing
work ethic and his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.
