Wallachia

Mignola, Mike (pencils). Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Topps, 1992. Four-issue adaptation of the film by Francis Ford Coppola; available in trade paperback.

Bowie, David and David Mallet. “Ashes to Ashes.” 1980. At the time the most expensive music video ever made.

Picard was quite good but, like most episodes of Discovery, it rarely felt like Star Trek to me. I think just want an optimistic crew going on adventures more?

Ion and Kwasi take Marley to the pub. They hear some music, she notices that something’s up with Nea Eugen, and (another) strange visitor arrives in town.

Here’s a summary of a 1701 account by Joseph Pitton de Tournefortof of a Vrykolakas (Greek vampire) terrorizing an island community. Lord Byron references the story in his notes on vampires.

It’s hard for me to focus on programming with the kids at home. I have a bunch of ways I want to improve the Wallachia app that I’m excited about, and I’m trying to figure out how to get my head in the right place for coding. That aside, chapter 11 should be out before too long.

Far Sector continues to be one of the best books going.

Here’s a chilling 13th century Wallachian legend about Manoli, a stonemason tasked by Radu the Black to build a monastery.

Sypha calls Jason Isaacs’s character in season three of Castlevania a “township judge.” I suspect that’s from județ, which was an administrative office combining judge and major in Wallachia and Moldavia. Her line is that it was, “a very old term for the headman and landlord of a town, from the time before boyars and lords.” Boyar was an aristocratic rank in slavic countries. Dracula describes himself as one in chapter two: “Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master.”

I’ve read a good portion of the vampire stories published prior to 1900. Here are what I consider to be the essential ones. You can get all of them for free or very cheap as ebooks.

Any collection of vampire stories must start with Dracula. Bram Stoker’s novel deserves its status as a classic and, unlike a good deal of 19th century literature, is perfectly readable to modern eyes. If you’ve never read it, Dracula is one you shouldn’t skip.

📕Dracula: Kindle,^* Apple Books, Project Gutenberg

If Stoker is the father of vampire literature, Lord Byron is its grandfather. His 1813 poem, The Giaour, contains one of the first references to vampires in the English language. Lines 757–768:

But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.

Full text of the poem here.

In the summer of 1816, Byron, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John William Polidori spent a weekend together in Switzerland where they engaged in a “ghost writing” contest. From that weekend, Shelley produced Frankenstein, and Byron wrote A Fragment of A Novel, an early take on a vampire story.

📕A Fragment: Read online here.

Inspired by Byron’s story, Polidori wrote The Vampyre; A Tale, in which our protagonist Aubrey comes to meet Lord Ruthven and discovers him to be a fiend who preys upon Europe’s socialites.

📕The Vampyre: Kindle, Apple Books, Project Gutenberg

The next major work is probably the 1845–1847 penny dreadful Varney the Vampire by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest. It’s fun and was definitely an influence on Stoker, but I wouldn’t call it essential reading.

A direct precursor to Dracula comes with Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871–1872 serial Carmilla. It features/establishes the lesbian vampire and has a vampire hunter who clearly presages Van Helsing.

📕Carmilla is featured in Le Fanu’s collection In a Glass Darkly: Kindle,^† Apple Books, Project Gutenberg

For further reading, Andrew Barger’s collection, 📕The Best Vampire Stories 1800–1849: A Classic Vampire Anthology (Kindle, Apple Books) is well worth the money.

Last and least, there’s my own book, 📕Wallachia, which is set 77 years before the events of Dracula. I put out new chapters every few weeks for free via an iOS app I designed, or you can listen to the audiobooks as a podcast, or get the prelude, Flowers of Transylvania, on Kindle or Apple Books.

* I couldn’t find a free Kindle edition of Dracula. It’s in the public domain so it should be free. Project Gutenberg and Apple Books both have it.

† Amazon’s copy of In a Glass Darkly is split into three parts, the third of which has Carmilla. For 98¢ you can get the whole collection for Kindle, which has a few other good ghost stories. The Apple Books and Project Gutenberg collections are complete and free.

Important research on Bunnicula from The Flophouse. 🐰🧛🏻‍♂️

Father Abraham faces the possibility there’s been a murder in the village.

DRACULA, MOTHERFKER by de Campi and Henderson coming this fall

New graphic novel from Image due out in October. 🧛🏿‍♂️Count me in.

Feeling miserably weak? Have a ghastly pale complexion (but without anæmic signs)? Sterterous breathing and heavy, lethargic sleep with frightening dreams, and gums shrunken back from the teeth? You may have recently been bit by Count Dracula. (But wash your hands, anyway.)

The Legend of Poenari Citadel

Good piece on this now-ruined fortress that Vlad III Dracula used. My fictional Castelul Argeş in Wallachia stands just a bit north, across the river.

It’s fortunate that Warren Ellis knew to sprinkle dashes of camp and levity into Castlevania.

I’m trying to figure out how Oină works. A maybe-predecessor to baseball, it’s a national sport in Romania and I sort of want to work it into Wallachia somewhere. Here’s a video (in Romanian, which I don’t speak!) that has a good cartoon demonstration of it.

There’s a small scene in the first episode of season three of Castlevania where there’s some haggling over money. Hungary in that era used denarii. Moldavia, to the east, grosh (or grosz). Both were circulated in Wallachia in the 15th century. See: History of coins in Romania.

I’ve just released chapter 10 of Wallachia, “Red Tower Pass.” Horses and vampires and wolves, oh my! (Get it on the App Store!)

As I say in the news section, this one was very hard for me to get down. I knew what was going to happen in the story, but I just couldn’t make the words come out right. One morning I woke up with a new opening line in my head, and it started to slowly to come together from there. Not that there’s anything special about the opening line — it’s no “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” — just that once I figured out I needed to flash back a little bit between the present moment and Marley’s first ride to Turnu Roșu Pass, the story started to work.

The other problem was that I hadn’t intended to reveal where Marley had been for those two years just yet, but I couldn’t figure out how to write around it. Having a whole chapter where two characters avoid talking about something just to keep the reader in the dark didn’t work. Once I let go of that and let the story take me where it wanted to go, I wound up with something I was happy with.

Here’s a painting of Turnu Roșu Pass from 1831.

Chapter 10 is written and edited. I need to read it over a few more times, then record the audio for it. The kids are out of school tomorrow and we’re going to Mount Vernon so it should be out on Wednesday.

I wish this chapter hadn’t taken this long. It was frustrating trying to write it because I knew what was going to happen in the story but couldn’t get the words to come out right. I hope you’ll agree one you read it that it was worth the wait.

More on all of it as soon as it’s ready. Thank you for your patience.

We follow Ion up the steps to Castelul Argeş, see a little of what life is like for those who work in the castle when an important nobleman like Count Dracula arrives, and Cornel takes a walk.

Today, February 24, is the date of the events of the pilot of Twin Peaks. From there the first season happens more or less one episode/day. Fire Walk With Me is a few weeks earlier, but it never makes sense to watch a prequel first.

Bugs Bunny in Transylvania 6-5000. (Unfortunately the WB only has a shortened version up on YouTube.)

“Transylvania” by Jake Kaufman for the NES DuckTales game.

Sengir Vampire. Art by Anson Maddocks.