Chelsea Quinn Yarbro0.0 1910: The great powers of Europe are united by ties of blood, but divided by conflicting ambitions and alliances. Now residing in Russia, Saint-Germain accepts an urgent commission from Czar Nicholas to deliver a top-secret peace proposal to the Czar's kinsmen, King Edward VII of England and Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany. The Czar dares not trust his own ministers: only through Saint-Germain can he hope to avert the coming war. But the Count's mission attracts dangerous enemies, most notably Baron von Wolgast, a scheming manufacturer of munitions who sees no profit in peace. Employing a network of spies and assassins, Von Wolgast plots against Saint-Germain, and when the Count becomes involved with Rowena Saxon, an independent-minded young artist, she too becomes a target of the Baron's malevolence.
Carol Margaret Davison0.0 In 1897, Archibald Constable & Company published a novel by the unheralded Bram Stoker. That novel, Dracula, has gone on to become perhaps the most influential novel of all time. To commemorate the centennial of that great novel, Carol Margaret Davison has brought together this collection of essays by some of the world's leading scholars. The essays analyze Stoker's original novel and celebrate its legacy in popular culture. The continuing presence of Dracula and vampire fiction and films provides proof that, as Davison writes, Dracula is "alive and sucking."
"Dracula is a Gothic mandala, a vast design in which multiple reflections of the elements of the genre are configured in elegant sets of symmetries. It is also a sort of lens, bringing focus and compression to diverse Gothic motifs, including not only vampirism but madness, the night, spoiled innocence, disorder in nature, sacrilege, cannibalism, necrophilia, psychic projection, the succubus, the incubus, the ruin, and the tomb. Gathering up and unifying all that came before it, and casting its great shadow over all that came and continues to come after, its influence on twentieth-century Gothic fiction and film is unique and irresistible."
