Once I realized that Oolanga just needed to be reframed and given more direct purpose in the story, writing about him wasn’t that hard. Granted, it’ll all have to be rewritten, but I assume that’s true of most everything so far. Chapter IX, too, was easy enough because it’s mostly exposition.
Obviously, all this stuff has to be rewritten. Nobody wants to read 50, 80, 100K words of exposition. I feel like if you’re going to ask people to read something, you need to make it as good as you can. Or at least good enough that you’re not betraying a disregard for their time.
Chapter X in the original manuscript is called Smelling Death. Now. I’m sure. At the time. This sounded pretty badass. Kinda spooky. But today it sounds like a joke, like A Mighty Wind. I’m keeping the title for now, but that’s the just the beginning of the issues here.
There is a pattern, I think, to the way this book is written: Most of the chapters seem to have two distinct parts. One part is referenced by the title. The other…is not. For example, Oolanga is about, naturally, Oolanga. But also about mongoose murder.
“Smelling Death” also has two parts: The hike in the country where Adam uses his mongoose procurer Davenport (not to be confused with his mongoose pimp, Ross) to trick Oolanga into using his powers to smell death to…uh…smell death. From this we learn that lots of people have died at Castra Regis. It is singularly unenlightening.
We also get Oolanga’s reverence at Diana’s Grove, once again suggesting some kind of awareness of and fealty to snake gods. Which again is contradicted by his later attempts to blackmail Arabella.
But the end of this chapter is also contradictory: Adam takes his new mongoose out only to have it put in the thrall of Lady Arabella. There’s some question as to whether this is because there are ordinary mongooses and extraordinary mongooses, and the former pose no problem to Lady Arabella while the latter must be murdered on site.
Then it’s pretty clear she uses some indirect means to kill the enthralled mongoose. The special mongoose, of course, lives until Oolanga sics it on her in his last chapter. (I am still struggling with mongooses as a story mechanic.)
So as this chapter did not help the story back then—oh, there’s yet even more exposition about the staring contest which leads into the next chapter “First Encounter”—I do not expect it to be of much help now. Perhaps I spoke to soon here and should simply elide it.
The big deal about Chapter XI is that it brings The Birds. And The Birds lead to The Kite. Well, I moved the birds up to Chapter VIII, making it absolutely clear that this is the second staring contest, that Oolanga was a part of it, and that something has been awakened in Lila that is in opposition to Caswall’s evil.
That’s right: I’m pretty convinced that Stoker had in mind a good vs. evil struggle between Caswall and Lila. He constantly refers to them battling and the whole book is actually more oriented around their battles of wills than it is the white worm! This raises further issues because Arabella is both motivated by ordinary pecuniary desires and the rather inscrutable motivations of an antediluvian monster, and this is very muddled in the original manuscript.
But for now, we actually get a bit of a break: Chapter XII is The Kite, and it and the subsequent chapters are a deep dive in Caswall’s encroaching madness. I see a parallel between him and Arabella. He has ordinary desires as well, but is also under some sort of (sadly poorly developed) mystical influence.
And we’re off!
Lair Of The White Wyrm 