Something in the Blood

The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula

By: David J. Skal

Narrated by: James Patrick Cronin

Length: 21 hrs and 19 mins

Publisher's summary

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in this psychological and cultural portrait, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon.

Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as a boy, and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmeric quack cures, and the gnawing obsession with "bad blood" that informs every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintance and romantic rival, Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow side - a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic novel.

The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's passionate youthful correspondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adoration of the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in splendidly Gothic detail.

©2015 David J. Skal (P)2016 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Fascinating portrait of author and his world

Any additional comments?

What a fascinating book this is, packed with details I'd not previously read, not to mention the way it pulls together a number of strings, such as the complicated relationship between Stoker and Oscar Wilde into a vivid portrait, as well as a series of, to date, unanswerable questions.

A biography with a large portion about Stoker

If you've got a lot of time on your hands, this author in need of an editor is just for you. It goes half an hour or more without even talking about Stoker quite regularly. Would you like to hear a poem about syphilis, because Oscar Wilde may have had syphilis and he knew Stoker? Seems like it was very necessary to include.

This was a perfect book

What a dark treat. Thank you David Skal for creating such a sweeping epic tale. For the obsessive Dracula fan, this was a perfect book.

Much More Than Just Stoker

This audiobook was a tough one to get through. It focused on Oscar Wilde as much as it did Stoker and also rambled at length in a number of places about people that only lightly crossed paths with Stoker. He definitely beat a dead horse on several topics in this book. I’ve read several of Skal’s other books and enjoyed them, but this one is disappointing.

Stoker's life was surely fascinating...

... this book is, sadly, not so much. I get that the author wishes to add to all previous Bram Stoker biographies. I also get it's created in the modern age, and so is unseparable from everything previously said and written on the topic. However, the author's ventures into pseudo psychological analysis of Stoker quickly becomes tiring. So does his erratic train of thought in general. Skal appears to be off his Ritalin for much of the book. I get that Oscar Wilde was a key figure in Stoker's, his wife's and, indeed, all of Victorian England's life. I, however, was under the impression I purchased a biography on Stoker, not on Wilde. The choice to use the voice actor is also quite underwhelming. He sounds like he's bored himself and in disbelief this is the only kind of work he can get. I've watched Dracula with Skal's commentary. He has a perfectly adequate voice. Perhaps given the chance to read his own words, he'd have breathed more life into the text. As is, this production is rather disappointing even for diehard Dracula enthusiasts.