After finally catching up with Twilight , I thought I'd go the whole hog and read Bram Stoker's Dracula . Stoker didn't exactly invent the vampire genre. Vampires are figures of folklore and mythology, and other vampire novels preceded his, but he set the template for what was to follow. Abraham Stoker was an Irish protestant, a member of Dublin's governing class with a promising career in in the Irish public service. His first book sounds particularly exciting - The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland , published in 1879. However, by the time it was published he had already run away to join the theatre. To be precise, he accepted the role of business manager at actor Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London, where for the next thirty years he acted as the calm, organised foil to Irving's charisma and persuasive powers. His own creativity also blossomed and when he was not pandering to Irving's ego he wrote and published a number of no
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson