Stoker v Lovecraft

NGL, that sounds like a kick-ass idea: Stoker v Lovecraft! But this concerns my earliest introduction to Stoker’s novel:

Better known…is the ingenious Bram Stoker, who created many starkly horrific conceptions in a series of novels whose poor technique sadly impairs their net effect. The Lair of the White Worm, dealing with a gigantic primitive entity that lurks in a vault beneath an ancient castle, utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile.

This is fair. But while looking it up I discovered that HPL harbored a conspiracy theory that Stoker hadn’t written any of his novels. That he had presented his editors with a mess and they had done the actual writing for him.

First, I want to clarify, I don’t know the extent to which he harbored this idea. It was apparently based on correspondence he’d had with an editor who refused to work with Stoker on Dracula, who described the mess. It’s possible that he got the idea stuck in his head and carried it to his grave, or that it excited him for a while and then he later set it aside as he did some other ideas.

I can see HPL, a fussy New England shut-in, not being able to grasp the way Stoker—a theater manager!—worked.

Also, it’s easy to be a perfectionist when the longest thing you write is in the 40,000 word range. Dracula is about 4x that and one of the vanities a sharp intellect seduces you into is thinking “Well, if I couldn’t do it, this moron couldn’t either!”

Well, yeah, maybe nobody could work the way HPL did (including HPL) for a novel. I suspect Stoker was comfortable of levels of chaos that would’ve put HPL into an even more premature grave.

Having read all of Stoker’s work at this point, I can aver that it is all very consistent. The world-view, the writing style—which isn’t to stay that Bram didn’t grow over the years—even the things I would consider defects, they’re all very consistent book after book.

I would say, for example, that he had trouble with endings. Dracula‘s, for example, is woefully inadequate to the previous 155,000 words. That’s his fifth book! His ninth book, The Man, finally nails it. He overplays the ending slightly in his tenth book, The Lady Athlyne and then he has a stroke, so the last third of The Lady of the Shroud is geopolitical musings and science-fiction.

And then there’s Lair of the White Worm where he goes full Evil Dead for the ending and then the last lines are:

Come home as soon as you can. I shall see that breakfast is ready. I think we all want it.

HPL saw LotWW as a senile Bram Stoker revealing himself as a fraud. My counter-argument is that it’s the very fact that the novel is a mess that proves Stoker wrote all his own work, and the editorial influence may have ebbed and flowed but it didn’t constitute all that much of a contribution.

If all his efforts had been the work of an unknown editor, Lair of the White Worm would’ve been cleaned up before release, just like his other books.

Furthermore, there’s no reason to assume (that I can see) that anyone would’ve offered such services to Stoker. He wasn’t some kind of name—a proto-Roald Dahl, let’s say, calling on an example of a guy who, in his later years, used to turn in messes. Even Dracula sold something like 2,500 copies on its first run. He had to condense it to cheap paperback form to collect royalties at all.

You’d have to be H. P. Lovecraft—or a modern indie book writer—to consider that level of sales to be success.