One of the odd things about working from someone else’s material is when you wonder if you’ve stumbled upon something that the original author thought of but then dropped, for whatever reason. Case in point: Mimi.

I sometimes suspect Lilla was the original love interest for Adam, and there’s a lot of confusion in the manuscript as to which girl he’s talking about. Lilla comes across as the “Mina” character (if I remember my Dracula correctly) while Mimi seems wilder. Not as wild as “Lucy”, perhaps, but more suited to being Caswall’s first victim—which would make sense if we were re-writing Dracula and had no antediluvian serpent on our hands. (Those who would over-simplify Stoker’s attitude about the races would do well to note that the heroine of the book has a Burmese mother.)

The bulk of Act 3 in the original is an attempt to save Mimi’s life from the attacks of the giant snake, whom our heroes have ascertained is the primary target of WW. This results in an awkward marriage arrangement which seems a bit out of date for 1911. And then a long, fruitless chase scene that ends with Adam and Mimi returning to Doom Tower.

None of this is adequately explained. They abandon Lilla, it’s hard to avoid noticing. And it’s Lilla who is the threat to Arabella’s plans. (Watford just vanishes from the story.) But WW leaves her comfortable lair to chase Adam and Mimi out in the open.

From a story perspective, this gives you a nice chase scene, and a way for our characters to (finally!) interact with the WW. So even though it’s “pointless,” it at least makes dramatic sense.

Except for the whole why of it. Mimi’s sole power is that she has it within her to counter Caswall. She has some Burmese snake charming power hinted at,, but it’s never developed. So, by mere virtue of leaving she ceases to be a threat to anyone.

In order to get the snake to chase her, Mimi has to be some sort of threat, which means (to me) that she has to have some kind of important impact on the end of the story. I’ve been wrestling with that one.

But it occurs to me, it’s even harder to figure out why WW would chase a threat that was leaving. If Mimi had something the WW needed, maybe.

Or….or if it were a deliberate provocation. That feels better because it gives our characters something to do that’s not totally reactive.

Interesting.

The more I try to give the story a sense of urgency, the more the Worm Rises To The Fore.

Which makes sense.

But there’s still this big leap: In my rewrite, the readers know there’s a White Worm pretty much from jump. The coyness really doesn’t work in the original because Stoker couldn’t decide how coy he wanted to be. I mean, Arabella is pretty much convicted of herpetophilia* when she slithers out of her coach, but then we don’t get an worm appearance till about 2/3rds through the book, by which point all the characters are utterly convinced of its existence.

But my worm is active. So to speak. It has to have a path to winning that goes beyond marrying the local lord.

For me, Adam is problematic because I can’t get him to believe in the Worm. He’s gonna see it, and that’s probably going to seal the deal for everyone on the good guy side. Of course, Arabella/WW knows.

But that leaves Edgar. Edgar has to know, pretty well, that it’s there and real, for family reasons. But how to make the readers get that without, IDK, showing ancient Caswall’s down at the Pub buying ales for giant worms? I’m already too exposition heavy. I suspect the final length of the book will close in on 300 pages minus a whole bunch of exposition I plan to trim. I think 240-250 pages would work.

But Edgar is struggling, at some level, to feel normal while having all these weird family pressures (which include dealings with worms) close in on him. And I have him at points thinking almost normal thoughts, and at other points almost casually worm-adjacent…there has to be a good way to put that out without being jarring, I think.

Meanwhile, I’m rooting out a bunch of inappropriate words. The narrative can (and probably should to some extent) be modern. But I can’t have my 1888 characters saying “repurpose”, since that word was invented in the 1980s.

Edgar now arrives the week before Adam, but the party is still the night after Adam arrives. When Adam arrives, things are in full swing. Adam probably needs a bit more to do, since he is kind of the Last Scion (as are Edgar, the Watford Girls, and Sir Nathaniel). Arabella is, too, perhaps… re-reading the source threw me for a loop, with March buying the place for Arabella… that just doesn’t add up.

Overall, things are good, though: The characters are coming into their own and their conflicts and desires are driving things forward.

Onward!

*herpetophilia: If you have herpetophilia, when you’re cut you bleed tiny snakes.

The characters are well-defined. Most of the major plot points are clear. New points are emerging, and little details that tie everything together are popping up pleasantly proffering practical and promising plot points—crap, I already used “plot points”. This is why you must resist the siren song of alliteration, Sean Penn!

The only thing that’s really lacking is the sense of urgency. I mean, on the one hand, we do have a ratcheting of tension—really, borrowed from Stoker, who does it just by the power of assertion—but it starts about half-way through, and we want a little more than “because we say so”.

The original has a double-inciting event: Adam Salton Arrives. Also, Edgar Caswall arrives. Note that neither of these arrivals is The White Worm. So how do they incite? One of the flaws with the original, in this regard, is precisely that it puts Caswall in the center of the activity—all well and good if one didn’t have a book named Lair of the White Worm—and the original compounds this by not actually giving us a white worm till about 2/3rds of the way through!

Now, I can rationalize Edgar being the inciting event and support it, but this makes our Worm more passive than it behooves a GADS* to be. One of the great things about Dracula is how ahead of the game the Count always seems to be. Our Lady of the White Worm (what does he even mean by that?) should be no less formidable, and be operating under the radar until our heroes figure things out.

The word “spelunking” was coined in 1944 in the United States of America, and as kind of a poke at the British term for cave exploration, “speleology”.

So you absolutely should not use it in your book about 19th century adventurers venturing into caves to find antediluvian monsters.

Just thought you’d want to know.

I am pretty comfortable the mess I have now is better than the mess that is my source material, but it’s still a far cry from good. So, how do we fix? First, we identify the main issues:

1. The nature of the White Worm
2. Arabella’s relationship to it
3. The nature of Edgar Caswall
4. Caswall’s relationship to the White Worm

Without the Arabella/Caswall/White Worm triumvirate—this is a sloppy but accurate use of the word “triumvirate”—there’s no book. Well, the book that’s left is some sort of Jane Austen/Henry James thing. (Which sounds pretty good, but focus, dammit!)

I actually have these four points nailed down, as far as my rewrite goes, but we need a lot more than this to make a good story. So let’s look at our characters, in a rough order of importance from the original:

1. Lady Arabella March
2. Edgar Caswall
3. Mimi Watford
4. Adam Salton
5. Oolanga
6. Lilla Watford
7. Sir Nathaniel
8. Michael Watford
9. Richard Salton
10. Cavendish
11. Simon
12. Ross

OK, I’m reaching there at the end. But no matter how I shake it, the main character of the White Worm is Lady Arabella. Even if Adam is meant to be the hero—and I put Mimi above him, since she’s the one who actually confront Edgar and is the last to see Arabella alive, and also the factor that keeps Caswall from dominating Mimi—he’s absent from, I dunno, half the book? And he just doesn’t do much on the pages.

He waits. He knows his opportunity will arise, so he waits for it. Then he blows stuff up.

For all that, though, his motivations are pretty obvious: He’s looking for an English adventure with his rich, long-lost uncle, then he wants to marry Mimi (or sometimes Lilla, but let’s assume those are typos), then he wants to destroy evil.

Fine, fine, we need someone to do all that. Our major change for Adam will be him actually doing stuff. Now, let me recalibrate for my rewrite:

1. Lady Arabella March
2. The White Worm
3. Edgar Caswall
4. The Caswalls
5. Mimi Watford
6. Lilla Watford
7. Adam Salton
8. Sir Nathaniel
9. Richard Salton
10. Michael Watford
11. Cavendish
12. Simon

The way I see it, Arabella needs to have her motivations and the White Worm needs to have its motivations. This is actually in the source, but it’s never clarified, and we end up gibberish like Arabella being a giant snake (with mind control powers?) who carries a gun for protection.

So, we need to set these things up. The motivations can be mysterious, they can be confusing, even to a degree—to the reader but never the writer—but without them, we have a whole bunch of pointless meandering.

The Edgar/Caswalls split is a little harder to justify from the source, so I won’t. I feel like Bram was revisiting Dracula, which is cool, man, but doesn’t give us a lot to work with. I like the idea of Edgar struggling with his nature in a similar way that Arabella struggles with hers, though with obviously different sources of problems.

In fact, duality is probably the way to go for all the characters. Mimi is proper English lady on the one hand, but in touch with her mystic southeast Asian (yeah, I know) roots; Adam is a down-to-earth modern dude on the one hand but wrestling with the ancient and supernatural elements—

—Let’s pause a moment to discuss Oolanga, because the Big Oo’s duality could actually be really cool: On the one hand, he’s an awful con man, but on the other, he could have powers comparable or complementary to Edgar’s. But his showdown with Arabella is the thing that convinces Adam of Arabella’s nature.

I don’t know about keeping him, but I do know I want that moment. I think I have it figured out, as well.

Lilla’s duality is between her spiritual and worldly nature. She’s genuinely holy—and I am amping up her religiosity—but she’s a little dumb about it, too. She believes God will protect her even when it seems to be Mimi saving the day. She’s attracted to Edgar (which is something that must be better defined than it was) but it’s a mix of romantic love and an ardent desire to save his soul.

That’s gonna be good.

Sir Nathaniel’s also going to be better. His duality is that he’s old (heh) but he doesn’t want to be. He’s going to be the Jim to Richard Salton’s Marlon Perkins. He’s going to do risky things that he can’t bring himself to talk about publicly, partly because they’re embarrassing superstition and partly because they’re deadly-if-true.

Salton’s going to be the research guy. His duality is in his “common touch”. He’s rich, or upper class, rather, even if the money isn’t there. But he’s conscious of his station in a kind of ex-post-facto way. That is, he wants to not abuse his position, but he tends to through absent-mindedness, rather than malice. He’s got some good bits already but I need to give him more to do.

I’ve got Watford pretty well figured out, too. He’s going to be oblivious, but not really. In the book, he was almost comical the way he walked in at awkward moments, and I’m going to keep that, but I’m going to give him a duality of “stiff upper lip English” and “semi-basket-case”. I mean, look, the guy has lost his wife, his two sons, and his two daughters-in-law.

Another interesting point: The girls all map to animals. Arabella is a snake. Lilla a dove. Mimi’s a mongoose, and don’t doubt it. Also, Edgar’s an eagle. There might be something there if we don’t get too goofy. (Adam’s a koala! Michael Watford’s a walrus!)

The White Worm

What does the White Worm want? In the original, it wants to marry Edgar which, I’m sorry, is not a proper goal for an antediluvian giant snake. Now, I’m not going to be coy here. I’ve figured all this out already, and I’ve figured out how TWW gets what it wants. That is, I have worked out the mechanism by which it achieves its goals generally—part of this is the greatest deviation from the original, and shameless borrowing from a pulp author who was just a bit after Bram Stoker.

The trick is trickling it out in a way that’s compelling and creepy.

Let’s say this: The central element of the plot is the seduction of Edgar by the White Worm. What are the things thwarting that? Well, Arabella doesn’t especially appeal to Edgar, beyond a social level, i.e., they’re about the same station. Lilla, being there and being more interesting to Edgar would seem to be a problem. I’ve made Adam a problem as well, just on the basis of Edgar’s being kind of a shut-in and not good at the social things.

Mimi is interesting because, on the one hand, she has no interest in seeing Lilla hook up with Edgar, which serves the snake’s interest. But she also susses out the snake-nature of Arabella instinctively. Besides being more attractive, Lilla’s an issue because of her holiness. She sees the good in Edgar and TWW does not want that. Besides which, her connection to St. Columba and the doves is a potential roadblock.

Nathaniel and the elder Salton are a problem because they know what’s going on. They’re our Van Helsings.

So, what’s a worm to do?

Chatper XXXV is “The Last Battle” but all the “battle” stuff has been between Lilla and Edgar, with Arabella as a supporting character at best. The actual climax of the book are Chapters XXXVIII and XXXIX, “On The Turret Roof” and “The Breaking Of The Storm”, respectively.

“On The Turret Roof”—well, actually, all the book—is very stagey, which prompts me to some thoughts about how writers describe things. The audience, after all, must understand what he’s writing and the readers and Stoker shared a common culture where drama is played out visually on stage. Even the artwork that accompanied the original book looks like it could be a stage prop.

In the past 20 years, I’ve come across written imagery that feels completely derived from CGI. And in the prior 20 years, I’ve read stuff that was clearly stolen from movies with practical visual effects. I’m lookin’ at you, Chris Claremont, and your full-on Hellraiser ripoff in Shadow Moon. (Willow!)

Anyway, the penultimate and antepenultimate chapters are also the longest in the book. “Turret”, alas, is half taken up with a discursion on mental illness. Edgar is, at this point, nuts. But after this long treatise (including the unfashionable word for psychiatrist, alienist) what does Mimi do but go right up on the tower because he asks her to. “Yes, he was completely psycho a moment ago—murdered my sister just the other day—but he seems fine now.”

This throws Arabella into a jealous rage. And, as soon as they’re on the roof, Edgar’s veil of sanity drops, so she hides. (She has a gun, but it’s not a Chekov’s Gun.) Then things get weird. Edgar decides he’s God or greater than God or the Devil or something. Oh, and he runs a little box up to the kite which completely fails to impress either girl, because its glowing light is a magnesium fire.

But then Arabella gets the genius idea to steal the kite. She runs off with the kite string and throws it down the worm hole, because she’s so fascinated with it and Adam’s got some damn Victorian depth-sounding thing that, I dunno, he’s left there in perpetuity. Nobody notices Arabella running through the castle and down the road with this spool of wire, which is apparently long enough to go all the way to the Diana’s Grove, and down the worm-hole.

I concede, at this point, that Stoker meant for Arabella to be the White Worm by his literal statements to that effect. But every action Arabella actually takes defies that. The worm-hole is where she’s lived for thousands of years, apparently, and her only means of ingress and egress. It’s utterly bananas to then write as though it holds any mystery for her.

It’s also bananas that all her motivations—literally all of them—are the motivations of a broke widow. There’s not a single moment where she thinks something or does something (non-superficial) and you think to yourself, “Oh, hey, that’s just what a giant, antediluvian snake would do.”

This is just a contrivance to get the kite string into the worm-hole, which Arabella does for some reason and then takes a nap by the worm-hole. And that’s literally the end of her.

Chapter XXXIX is even longer than its predecessor, and begins with Edgar and Mimi on top of the turret roof…silently…until finally they have a very mannered argument with Mimi threatening to tell Adam on Edgar. Edgar who just ranted about being “bigger than Jesus” and, oh, by the way, murdered your sister.

This ends with Mimi shooting the wicket and fleeing the castle, going back to Doom Hall to tell Adam everything—he’s been looking everywhere for her—and his explaining of the dangerous mixing of lightning and kites. They decide outside is the safest place and walk around all of the book’s locations, with Adam apparently being the first to notice the damn kite string. In another mind-bending twist, it’s Mimi who explains the wire to Adam though she did not notice when Arabella stole it and even referring to it as the “Kelvin sounder” which originates from the kite.

I realize now that Edgar seems to have magically gotten his own Kelvin Sounding Apparatus in the previous chapter, but there can be no rational explanation for why. The KSA (if I may be so familiar as to abbreviate it) is for measuring the depth of something—well, not something, but water. They used to let down a weighted rope and mark along the rope certain distances to know whether it was safe.

In fact, “mark twain” literally means that the water has been found to be two fathoms (12 feet) deep, and ergo safe for steamboats.

The KSA was an apparatus for fixing the weighted string, as near as I can tell. Which doubtless looks cool over an old well. But you could also just tie a weight to a string and drop it down the hole. Bam.

There’s no conceivable reason for Edgar to have one on his turret. (Measuring the height of the turret?) There was a whole thing earlier on where he had some sort of secondary string for running messages, and I think Stoker must’ve gotten the two confused.

Anyway, after wandering around, tracing the wire, our hero and heroine (Adam and Mimi) decide that it’s probably best to do nothing other than wander around.

Oy.

There’s a lot about how cool the storm would look if the two weren’t so distraught, what with the White Worm and Edgar The Murderer and all. Stoker even talks about the shore during a storm—recalling a great moment in Dracula—but they’re in Derbyshire, which as about as far as you can get from the shore in England. It’s actually kinda confusing. At the end, there’s even a reference to the sun rising over the eastern sea.

But although Derby is about as far as you can get from the sea, the British coast is not as inaccessible as you might think.

The Derby Telegraph

Anyway, our two protagonists wander around and end up right next to Diana’s Grove, which is incredibly dumb, since Adam knows there’s a metric ton of explosives under it. But it allows them to see the White Worm get blowed up real good.

Given the description, which includes parts of both Arabella’s body and the White Worm’s body, I think were-snake doesn’t work. The White Worm has two bodies, though both are women with a woman’s…whatever it is Stoker thought about women.

Chapter XL, Chapter 40, the very last chapter is called “Wreckage”, appropriately enough.

And we’re sticking with the whole sea theme. I did a search and being on the sea is mentioned once previously, in Chapter XVI, but … yeah, I don’t get it. In some ways it would make sense for there to be an easy outlet to the sea but again—Derbyshire. And that location doesn’t seem to be a minor detail.

Even though Castra Regis is high up, it’d have to be about 5,000 feet high—higher than the highest peak in England—to see the ocean.

Anyway, Nate and Adam leave Mimi asleep while they go visit the Grove, which has been utterly scrubbed of the gore blown out the worm hole the night before, but which also the site of a seething mass of corrupted flesh and blood, rife with maggots and other vermin, and also the crucial asset of the white clay.

Now, time for breakfast.

The end.

I have struggled mightily with this Arabella is a snake that lives in Diana’s Grove yet found a husband to buy Diana’s Grove yet he had no money so Diana’s Grove is in arrears but she’s going to live with her father and therefore wants to sell it to someone but is also going to marry Edgar so her money troubles are over.

It’s like watching giallo: Sometimes you just gotta say, this don’t make a lick of sense and enjoy the thing for what it is: A series of disjointed but occasionally cool imagery. Set to music by Goblin. OK, we don’t have any music by Goblin, but that’s a plus in my book.

The last eight chapters are the wind-up to the story, of course, and while we can rightfully acknowledge the quality of the pacing, it has to be admitted that these chapters do little for the cohesiveness of things.

Chapter XXXIII, “WAR À L’OUTRANCE”, which I believe means something like “overkill”, Adam decides to buy the Grove so he can better fight the worm. Sir Nathaniel adds that, hey, it’s a good investment ’cause of all the china clay—and that’s why the worm is white, by the way. The investment thing reminds me of the dialogue in The Big Lebowski.

 Also, let’s not forget – let’s *not* forget, Dude – that keeping wildlife, an amphibious rodent, for uh, domestic, you know, within the city – that aint legal either.

As far as keeping your eye on the ball goes. This is another gem:

I suppose, by the way, that there is no offence in calling her an old lady, considering that she has been disporting herself in her own way for some thousands of years.

Yes, I suppose we have to be especially circumspect in how we address the ancient snake monster.

Nathaniel caps the whole thing by saying the snake has mastered all the elements but fire—one of those things that he just says and Adam goes along with—but he’s got an ingenious plan to fill the caves with sand, which will create tremendous friction.

Adam puzzles over this until Sir Nathaniel adds “Then we’ll blow it up with tons of dynamite.”

Ahem. If I may quote Lebowski again:

That’s a great plan, Walter. That’s fuckin’ ingenious, if I understand it correctly. It’s a Swiss fuckin’ watch.

But the whole thing really intensifies the contradiction of wtf would Arabella sell Diana’s Grove when she absolutely needs it to survive?

Chapter XXXIV, “Apprehension”, Adam buys the Grove, meets up with Arabella and they go visit Caswall—remember him?—and his kite, and Arabella asks him to measure the depth of the worm-hole before she goes.

…before she finally left Diana’s Grove, where she had lived so long, she had a desire to know the depth of the well-hole.

Yeah, I don’t even know. At least per cover story, she’s only lived there, what, ten years?

Then Lilla—remember her? We last saw her in Chapter XVIII—decides she’s going to marry Caswall, and also that their courtship will be rocky since Caswall can totally dominate her if she doesn’t have Mimi’s help. Chicks, amirite?

This is followed up, in Chapter XXXV “The Last Battle”, as Lilla’s prospective mate comes to kill her. For some reason. Edgar and Lilla get locked into a battle of wills, Lady Arabella comes in to support Edgar, which strengthens Lilla (because she hates Arabella?) and then Mimi rushes in to save the day. They actually blast Edgar back through the door but Lilla dies.

This is such a mess, narratively. Lilla has exceeded Oolanga levels of superfluity at this point. She exists in order for Edgar to kill her with mind bullets. Fortunately, we’ve been prepared for this. By not having her drop out of half the book, and giving her things to do and her own plans, we can make some sense of her existence.

Chapter XXXVI, “Face to Face” has Mimi mourning over Lilla, and apart from some oddly incoherent moments, like Mimi unclear as to when Lilla died even though she was trying to revive her, ends with Mimi running to Castra Regis to confront Edgar who does not know he has killed Lilla.

Chapter XXXVII has the great title of “Eritis sicut Deus”, “you will be as God”, the words whispered to Eve by the serpent in the garden. And you really get a sense of what Stoker didn’t have the wherewithal to pull off (at that point in his life). The White Worm should have been running around corrupting people, doing deals and what-not. As opposed to…doing nothing…but killing Oolanga and trying to get hitched.

In this chapter, however, we have Mimi thinking she’s chasing Arabella into Edgar’s castle when in fact it’s Arabella chasing her into Edgar’s castle. There is more of the moment-to-moment incoherency, and for some reason Mimi feels comfortable pursuing Arabella even though she knows now, somehow, that Arabella is the snake and also that the snake “might never be seen again”.

From a purely practical standpoint, we go from Mimi running into Castra Regis to confront Edgar in Chapter XXXVI—to Mimi running into Castra Regis in Chapter XXXVII so that she can confront him in Chapter XXXVIII.

Meanwhile, we just hear that Adam is going ahead with his plans. He, somehow, doesn’t know about Lilla. Mr. Watford is gone. Nothing from Richard or Nathaniel. And Edgar’s about to go Full Dracula.

Needless to say, a lot of the subplots we set up earlier on are going to have to be fleshed out for any of this to make sense.

Chapter XXVII rolls around and at last we start to get some White Worm action, through rather maddeningly, in this chapter called “Green Light”, that’s all we get: a green light. But it’s okay because just as they know Arabella is the White Worm they never saw, they know the green light is a product of the White Worm (coming out of its eyes, if the pictures are to be believed).

Basically, Adam marries Mimi so it’s legit when he carts her off to Australia, but since the ship doesn’t arrive for ten days, they have a honeymoon on the Isle of Man (presuming the White Worm can’t get to them there), and when the evening before their antipodal adventure arrives, they go back to Doom Tower and while Mimi is asleep, Nathaniel shows Richard the green light from outside, and they both understand implicitly what that means.

There’s a kind of fascinating aspect here, really: Stoker, God bless him, is obviously having trouble concentrating. He’s just told us they’re doing all this stuff in secret so that the WW doesn’t find out, but then he immediately says, “Yeah, she knows it all.” But still they’re going to be secretive. And they’re not telling Mimi, for some reason. Their very lives may depend on Mimi not knowing. Also, they’re in grave danger, but for some reason not at that moment at Doom Tower.

So we have all the elements of spooky storytelling, but jumbled and contradicted.

Chapter XVIII is more of the same: Sir Nathaniel says, “Yeah, she knows everything except where you are. I don’t know how she knows.” But how does he know what she knows?

Apparently she’s been in her “true form” (a giant snake) since they left, doing “her rounds”—i.e., patrolling the neighborhood—well, just read:

She can look into windows of any ordinary kind. Happily, this house is beyond her reach, especially if she wishes—as she manifestly does—to remain unrecognised. But, even at this height, it is wise to show no lights, lest she might learn something of our presence or absence.

So we can infer that Doom Tower is too high for her to spy on without giving herself away, though she can apparently slither through the forest emitting green light-beams unnoticed.

Then there’s the whole muddled chivalry of don’t-tell-Mimi/she-should-know-the-worm-is-loose/ok-but-don’t-tell-her-it’s-looking-for-her. It’s the sort of thing that gets women refrigerated.

The boys go out into the woods where they—finally—see the White Worm, which apparently has some Trogdor The Burninator style arms, and run from it right back to Doom Tower. As dopey as this scene is, it’s critical because on page 200-something of your 300-page book called Lair of the White Worm, you need to show the freakin’ White Worm.

And yet, what it really is for, is effect. They’ve been sold on the white worm since about the time the mongoose went after Arabella. Well, before that. The mongoose attack sold them on the fact that Arabella was the white worm.

So, chapter XIX (“In The Enemy’s House”), naturally, they have tea with Arabella. The first two-thirds of the chapter is just gawdawful gibberish, as Sir Nathaniel rationalizes why it’s good that Arabella now knows everything (including where Mimi and Adam are), and why they should absolutely go to tea with her, and he’s pretty sure she won’t try anything because she’s a snake, and snakes are sneaky.

Adam worries for Nathaniel’s safety, but not for his wife’s. Oy.

Anyway, this is another “effect” chapter, with the idea being they’re having tea with an antediluvian serpent. It’s a cool idea, but apparently Arabella’s big plan is to light some curtains on fire so that Mimi runs into the worm hole. (Adam saves her, so that’s something useful he does.)

The motivation for all this, by the way, is to keep them from interfering with her plans to capture Caswall. No word on why Mimi would be a barrier to that plan, since it’s clear Caswall fancies Lila.

Chapter XXX, “A Race For Life”…continues the tea party. Which, again, is potentially a nice, surreal concept, but for the sheer lack of rationalization for why they’ve put themselves in this danger at all.

There’s this gem:

The mere way she kept constantly turning her head to look around her, the quick coming and going of the colour of her face, her hurried breathing, alternating with periods of suspicious calm, were to those who had power to discern subtle evidences of mental perturbation.

Subtle evidences, indeed. This is followed with a shockingly dumb statement about Mimi and Adam being touched by Arabella’s social graces. Sure enough this is followed by a dimming of the lights, echoing the earlier mind control attempts by Caswall (though with no other apparent connection) and the oh-so-clever Nathaniel rushes them all out to the carriage.

They then flee to Liverpool, their ship to Australia and presumed safety, although the giant snake is pursuing them the whole time. Adam is relieved that they made it to the ship, which once again raises the question of why the hell did they go tea with the monster?

They actually miss the boat, but then they take a steamship to catch up to the boat, as was all arranged, or something. I didn’t quite follow it (and I’ve read it several times) but none of it matters: They escape the WW and then immediately decide to turn around and go back to fight it.

In Chapter XXXI, “Back To Doom,” they get back to the tower in time to see Arabella (in human form) slither off to attempt to seduce Edgar again.

Which leads to a confusing chapter XXXII, “A Startling Proposition”. Mimi thinks she’s gone crazy and decides not to worry her pretty little head with anything. OK, I guess. But Sir Nathaniel concludes, on no possible basis, that the Lady Arabella—who is particularly agile at changing from snake to human form—gave up her pursuit of the happy couple because she’d managed to successfully win Edgar over, and no longer had need of…killing Adam and Mimi?

Then, in a latter, Arabella suggests Adam or one of his Aussie pals buy Diana’s Grove! What? Wait, doesn’t giant snake need Diana’s Grove? What’s more, she says her husband Captain Adolphus Ranger March bought the place! In direct contravention to—oh, my God, it was Lady Arabella’s husband who bought the place?!

Well, hell. Does that mean Arabella—who talks about her father wanting her to live with him in his dotage—went out in female form, seduced the Captain, got him to buy Diana’s Grove, somehow, even though he was broke by the only accounts we have…but why??? Following this path, if Diana’s Grove is in arrears, it’s not because of Arabella’s family if her family never owned the place prior to Captain March buying it.

And how does a Giant Antediluvian Snake have a father, if there was never a switcheroo? But if there was a switcheroo, how did the real Lady Arabella come across the giant snake? And if the giant snake has general polymorphic capabilities, why wouldn’t it use those to get its way—I mean, pass itself off as Adam, and Mimi’s toast.

But if its polymorphic capabilities are limited (say to female form), how is she passing for the real Lady Arabella?

Oy, I know how Mimi feels.

The main blessing of Chapter XXI is that Oolanga finally exeunts, and that source of cringe troubles us no more. But, lord, Arabella is full of supernatural wonder and Adam fully prepared to partner with her against Oolanga who, while a scoundrel of the worst sort, is at least not a giant antediluvian snake!

Beyond that, we get that the worm hole is super stinky. Oolanga takes a shot at Adam, who is unprepared because, I dunno, he was thinking about having lunch or maybe some walnuts and wine. But then he draws, I guess, while simultaneously closing with Oolanga to wrestle with him—I’m not sure but this may be something of a diss at pistols made by Weiss of Paris, which we are informed by the Lady manufactured her No. 3 pistol—and with Lady Arabella joining in…

Except the mongoose gets out of his locked cage..from the description it sounds almost like the mongoose unlocked it himself…

…and while the two dudes wrestle at the bring of the pit…

…the mongoose attackes Arabella, who tears it apart with her bare hands…

…after which she grabs Oolanga and pulls him down into the pit with her…

…after which the pit disgorges a font of blood, Army of Darkness style…

…after which Adam, stunned and nauseous turns to flee…

…only to discover that the Lady Arabella is there, at the top of the stair, completely unharmed…

Oy.

Oyoyoyoyoyoy.

This is about the halfway point of the book. The rest will proceed with the absolute conviction that: a) there is a worm; b) it’s white, but only circumstantially; c) Arabella is or isn’t the literal snake.

The real upshot of this is Adam has essentially caught Arabella red-handed, in…whatever it was that just happened.

Chapter XII is a letter from Arabella to Adam—interrupted by a future encounter between Arabella and Adam—in which Arabella basically gaslights Adam into believing he saw something other than what he saw, which suffers greatly from the reader not really knowing what happened in the previous chapter.

The only real point of interest is that Arabella escapes to London—acts for all the world like the death of Oolanga (and maybe some other factor) has allowed to her to flee Diana’s Grove.

It would be interesting if we had some action that resulted in some horrible relaxation of the worm’s grip on Arabella. At this point, I believe we are entering full into “she’s a were-snake” mode, though this is one of the murkiest issues in the book. From here on out we’re going to diverge more and more, of necessity to make this make sense.

Chapter XXIII, “An Enemy In The Dark” is another astounding chapter, in that the first half is a description of Chapter XI be recapitulated—without any of the details, no less!—followed by Richard congratulating Adam on his conciseness. The last half is Richard making sure that Adam doesn’t have a crush on Arabella and Adam confessing he has a crush on Mimi, and the two agreeing that Arabella is some sort of menace.

There’s actually very little in XIII to be salvaged. Chapter XIV, “Metabolism” is a continuation of the conversation begun in XIII, but with the door locked. In this, the two agree that there’s a monster (which still hasn’t been seen!) and that it has to be destroyed. They also agree that Arabella writes the letter to Adam for the sake of fooling Edgar. No word if she CCed him on it, or what.

Now, from what I can tell, the common interpretation of LotWW has it that Arabella is literally and actually the White Worm, body and soul! This may have been Stoker’s intention, but it raises a lot more questions than it answers, I think.

Like, why can she charm the non-special mongooses? Why does Edgar’s coldness toward Oolanga frighten her? Why does Oolanga frighten her? To paraphrase Captain Kirk in Star Trek V, what does a Giant Antediluvian Worm need with a husband? Is legal ownership of Diana’s Grove so important? And what happened to the original Arabella?

If we re-interpret the whole “falling into the well with Oolanga” as “snake pulls food into lair,” which is kind of intriguing, how does she reappear at the door outside of the worm-hole? Especially if the worm-hole/well is the worm’s only entree/exit?

The next two chapters (XXV, “The Decree” and XXVI, “A Living Barbette”)…are in fact continuations of the previous conversation, merely taking place after breakfast and Uncle Dick’s bedtime, respectively.

These four chapters XXIII through XXVI can be summarized as “Selling The Giant Worm”. Adam and Nate talk themselves into believing in a giant worm, that Arabella is of snake nature—though, again, this raises tremendous questions as to how she came into existence—and they both concur that Mimi Watford is in such tremendous danger, she should be escorted to Australia.

Chapter XXVI, the unkindest blow, the antediluvian monster has “the want of principle of a sufragette”. Heh. Agreeing that Mimi is in peril and that Arabella is an ancient snake—still unseen by any character in the book!—Adam has to marry Mimi and Nathaniel has to be the one to ask.

Now, at this point, Mimi has done the battle-of-wills thing with Caswall three-ish times. She’s never encountered a snake, much less a giant white worm. She’s barely interacted with Adam whom we’ve on multiple occasions have been assured is a rival of Caswall’s for Lilla’s attention.

Even if we go with what we presume Stoker’s intentions were, we’re starved for useful progression. Keep in mind we’ve come from an unbroken stretch of Edgar material, the action scene at the worm-hole, and now an unbroken exposition dumb between Nate and Adam. This is going to be followed by an unbroken 4-5 chapter stretch where, at last, we get some worm action. So with a whole section devoted to doves and kites, the next quarter of the book will simply drop that whole issue.

But in our rewrite, we’re just gonna drop these out for some other kind of action and by checking in on some of our other characters.

One thing about this book is how much it seems to hit a kind of climax at Edgar losing his marbles well before the half-way point of the book, and the rest seems to be a talky race to the finish. Even compromised, Stoker had a sense of creating excitement. It will be a challenge to retain that.

Having ascertained that we need to spread out the Edgar stretch, we come to “Oolanga’s Hallucinations” a chapter which entails Arabella conniving to get in to see Edgar—which we can work with—and Oolanga skulking about to try to blackmail her into “lub”.

The course of true lub nebber ran smoove.

Eddie Murphy as Buckwheat, doing Shakespeare

All the machinations literally amount to nothing except this blackmail attempt. It’s wonderfully racist, if racism can be wonderful, to say nothing of classist—not just our witch doctor’s race but our lady’s station are the main factors in this grotesquerie.

Oolanga is gone in five chapters, too. And his sole purpose—besides highlighting Edgar and Arabella’s apparently fully justified racism—is to convince Adam that Arabella’s not all well. Not cricket. Not exactly a good guy…er, gal…er, snake.

A bigger problem for us, even if we planned to market this book to racists, which I’m repeatedly assured are a huge market, is that it’s all really boring. The six chapters after the Edgar Stretch are a lot of milling around.

We get “Oolanga’s Hallucinations”, in which he is spurned. “Battle Renewed” which is “Hawk & Dove” and “The First Encounter” done either a third or second time depending on whether those two chapters describe the same or different events.

“Battle Renewed” has the kite break at least—but then it’s instantly repaired! And Watford comes in again with the bird report!

Chapter XVII, “The Shutting of the Door” sums up to Edgar hates everyone and goes back to the one thing he knows loves him—his kite, and Adam gets more mongooses. Caswall also kills his old servant by asking him to talk about the box, which he’s already opened in the Edgar Stretch.

The Aeolian harp emerges. The girls are setting one up in “Battle Renewed”, and the string of the kite resembles the Aeolian harp in sound. (I urge you to go listen to some aeolian harps to understand the questionability of setting one up near the place you sleep and read and eat.) There’s something to this, but I’m not sure what. It’s one of those ideas that could be spooky and cool but never quite goes anywhere. It doesn’t super-evoke snake charming to me, but I don’t know enough about either aeolian harps or snake charming to say.

Chapter XVIII is just unfortunate. (The picture of Oolanga carrying along dead snakes should be back in Chapter VIII, “Oolanga” but is miscaptioned “Oolanga’s black face…peering out from a clump of evergreens”.) The first half describes Adam being followed by Arabella being followed by Oolanga. The second half, which seems to take place hours later, has Caswall watching all this unfold. The description of Caswall being upset over the death of his servant is muddled, as well: Stoker wants to make it clear that Adam doesn’t actually care (any more than Arabella, who is using this death as a pretext to approach Caswall) but the occsaional word choice inclines the reader to think maybe he does care a little.

The idea is that Caswall is upset because old Simon was his only link to his past. But later on we get:

That night Edgar Caswall had slept badly. The tragic occurrence of the day was on his mind, and he kept waking and thinking of it.

The only way this makes sense is if the “tragic occurrence” is this lost link to his past, but it’s really hard (at least for me) to parse it that way. If someone annoys you by dying…it seems like you’d use different words.

Chapter XIX continues the unfortunateness. Arabella tries to worm (hah!) her way into Edgar’s heart but is put off by the fact that he really DGAF. Which is funny because she DGAF either. She’s trying to be normal and warm, and he’s trying to be an English gentleman. And the racism comes out with Caswall suggesting that if Oolanga gives her the slightest bit of trouble, to just shoot him. Our first occurrence of the N-word.

Which, I think, lends credence to my idea that Stoker was rather against the random murder of American blacks he was doubtless reading about in the papers. But doesn’t help us here.

Neither does it help us that—hell, I think this is the FIRST actual dialogue exchanged by Arabella and Caswall, directly. We can assume a lot of things, but all of a sudden, she’s the demure normal one frightened by Caswall’s callous attitude toward a negro she has recently threatened to murder herself. But still she counts the whole visit as a “win”.

I’m gonna run with this notion of “duality” because, holy cats, what the hell else can I do?

Meanwhile, the walk Adam started in Chapter XVIII gets continued, sorta, basically ending with him back at Lesser Hill where he and Nathaniel talk about the mystery of Diana’s Grove which we now find out was purchased by the Marches within Nathaniel’s lifetime and after his tenure as the President of the Mercian Arcaheological Society—and since we also know that Arabella was a little girl there, the Marches had to have come around in the past 30 years. In fact, this passage tells us Sir Nathaniel was looking over the house to see if it were sound enough to “bring the bride to”.

So, Nathan has seen the worm hole, although I guess locked and covered up. Maybe it’s just the room that’s locked, since he says he also almost fell into the hole. And he wanted to spelunk but it was no dice, I guess, from Old Man March. Now he’s saying, “Yeah, that’s how the worm (or whatever) gets out.”

At this point, we’ve had zero incidents of worm.

This cannot stand. We cannot be speculating on the Worm without there at least being an appearance by said Lumbricidae.

Chapter XX takes us back to the walk entered upon in Chapter XVIII tp describe Adam being tailed by Oolanga. Adam circles back to catch Oolanga snooping on Arabella, but the Dastardly Oolanga doesn’t know he’s there so the Good Adam can snoop on him in peace. (The sun is deep in the east suggesting a very early walk, which re-raises the irritation of Caswall watching the town for hours after drawn before seeing these three knuckleheads skulking around.) Also, now her eyes are green-tinted. I guess we gave up on the hippie glasses back after Chapter IV.

For some reason, she makes a date to see Oolanga at 7PM, and this chapter has Adam going back to spy on this meeting, wherein, in short order: Oolanga professes his lub, which is proposes to demonstrate by giving her the contents of the box he stole from Adam, which neither knows contains a mongoose. She responds by bringing out all the racial contempt she can muster, and by being afraid of him but claiming not be afraid of him, and giving Oolanga her gun.

If he wants to kill her, she assures him he’ll hang, because it’s not Germany or Ghana. Which.

Oh, then Arabella, apparently completely aware of Adam all along, invites him to the next chapter, “Exit Oolanga”.