Tom Joyce's chamber of the bizarre

Very cool Dracula-themed Google doodle today to mark Bram Stoker’s birthday. I like the fact that the depiction of Dracula they used is the one from Stoker’s book, not the one that became standard in later years. We’re talking the ugly old man version of Dracula. The one who’s not the least bit f**kable.

See, I’ve argued this point with other Dracula fans before, and I still insist I’m right. The sexy, seductive version of Dracula was not the one in Stoker’s book. That version of Dracula came later, when the handsome Bela Lugosi played him in the 1931 film version, and left his indelible stamp on the character and on virtually all subsequent portrayals of vampires in popular fiction.

But wait, didn’t Dracula seduce Lucy? Well, he sucked her blood and killed her. I don’t recall a scene in the book where he took her out for Thai food and salsa dancing first.

Here’s my trump card in that argument. A couple of times in the book, Stoker refers to Dracula’s foul breath. What do you expect? He’s dead, he subsists on blood and he lived in an era before Tic Tacs were invented.

Now there’s A LOT that seducers in gothic novels can get away with. They can be savage, impetuous and cruel. They can rob, ravish, plunder and murder. But they CANNOT get away with having bad breath.

So there. Game, set and match.