On Self-Betrayal.

Tonight’s note on the progress of Dracula is not amusing. The narrative has reached a new level.

The hunters have broken into Mina’s room and witnessed the final throes of the Count’s assault on her. By modern standards, and with the added dimension of genre familiarity, the simple details seem tame: Dracula has bitten Mina’s neck and drunk her blood, and then forced her to drink his own blood from a wound he has made on his chest. Well, it’s what you’d expect, isn’t it? Yawn, yawn? No. Stoker writes this very well indeed. The sense of brutality is almost palpable.

So now we have two subjects on which Stoker writes very well indeed: the varying moods of the lunatic, and the brutal reality of assault. What does it say of him that he should write of such things with such apparently innate understanding? What does it betray?

Of more personal interest, what do some of the things I’ve written say, or betray, about me? Are writers who write of horror – supernatural or otherwise – merely possessed of an instinctive and disturbingly accurate imagination? Or are they releasing some real dark side of themselves onto the page? In all honesty, I don’t know the answer to that.