Word: stoker
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...From Dracula by Bram Stoker...
Consider the plot. The girl Anna (Ullmann), casually abandoned by her drink-sodden seagoing father (Robert Donley), is seduced by a teen-age lout. Via instant replay she becomes a whore. Ill (the wages of sin), she returns to her father's barge. There she meets the Irish stoker Mat Burke, who is played by John Lithgow like a brain-numbed victim of killer bees. Naturally, these two crippled creatures fall in love. Anna confesses her past. Since Mat is a pre-ecumenical Roman Catholic, he is appalled that he has fallen for an unclean woman. But she tells...
Meanwhile, back at the castle, werewolves and vampires had taken over. In 1897, a London theatrical manager named Bram Stoker published a book called Dracula. It became the most popular story of the supernatural ever written. Uninformed about vampires, Stoker baldly invented his own lore of the undead-how a vampire changes at will into a wolf or a bat, cringes in terror at the sight of a Christian cross, and lives forever unless a wooden stake is driven through its heart...
Nevertheless, not many of the Count's constituents have ever bothered to read Stoker's epistolary novel. They are missing an authentic, if somewhat creaky treat. The story of the elegant old party, traveling from Transylvania to London in search of fresh plasma, was silly when it was written and is silly still...
Full perfume of the swamp, indeed. Whether a scholar who writes in so deep a shade of purple can even comprehend shame is uncertain. Yet Wolfs conclusion has some merit. Stoker, who was secretary to the actor Sir Henry Irving, shrewdly swotted Transylvanian geography and vampire lore at the British Museum reading room. His gleanings provided a European psychohistory before the term was coined, covering half-remembered terrors with gothic cobwebs. Stoker wrote several other romances of no particular power, but in Dracula he managed to create a classic, forever stalking his readers when their moral and rational defenses...