Midnight tales Book

Do not bother to read this book until you have read both of Bram Stoker's horror masterpieces, 'Dracula' and 'The Jewel of the Seven Stars'. To an extent, it is the literary equivalent to the 'special features and deleted scenes' disc that burdens purchases of favourite films but which are only ever watched by true nerds, film students or people who have far too much time on their hands. Count me as one of the first two (for 'film' read 'genre literature') since I certainly do not fall into the last category.

Having said that, the book remains in the library for two reasons. It is a good reference collection of Stoker ephemera including 'alternate cuts' from the 'Jewel' and 'Dracula' and it tells, in stages, a worthwhile story of the relationship between Stoker and the great actor Henry Irving, one in which there is a clear dialectic between Stoker's literary imagination and his role as general manager for the highly talented narcissist and his coterie of friends and acqaintances.

However, the small-scale works are rarely great and, perhaps excepting the atmospheric 'The Dream in the Dead House' (which is the Dracula episode), they are of limited interest except as curiosities of their time and place. 'The Dream' might have been written for a Terence Fisher Hammer movie ....

One story stands out as something quite unique - 'The Dualitists', written in a pastiche of that verbose Victorian style that so puts off modern readers (or at least we hope it is a pastiche). This is probably one of the sickest stories about psychopathic children that I have ever read, one with no redemption at the end. It is particularly disturbing to read in the week when the British Press is filled with the history of the Bulger case and other horrors perpetrated by sociopathic and feral kids. It shows how no imaginative horror might not come true in some form.

If one thing comes out of this book, it is that Stoker certainly had a very violent and morbid imagination which if publishers had had more of a free hand in their day might have made him the literary Sam Raimi of the turn of the last century. In fact, his more brutal work (such as the extremely violent and racist 'The Red Stockade') did get an outlet but in America which was less inclined to self censor. If anyone ever wants direct evidence, far beyond Kipling's high purpose, that the British Empire was an utterly bloody affair then this vicious sadistic story of imperial conquest might stand as evidence for the prosecution.

This bloody racist imperialism might be seen as particularly odd insofar as Stoker was an Irishman with a keen sense of the oppression of his own peasantry (if 'The Gombeen Man' is anything to go by) but you get the impression that he was not a political man. He wanted to write and to be appreciated for his writing and if the audience wanted blood, horror and thrills then, by gad, that's what he would give them.

If not great, there is still some good stuff in here - the three preceding stories show great skill and have distinctive elements but a life might profitably be lived without having read them. Some stories are dreadful - the hackneyed 'A Deed of Vengeance' and the twee 'The Spectre of Doom' might happily have been left as manuscripts to light the fire. Some are just extended black humour ('The Man from Shorrox') or perhaps not so extended, mere anecdotes for a book that never got written - 'The Midnight Tales' of the title.

Putting aside the deleted scenes and the macabre oddities, three stories stand out. The much anthologised horror, 'The Squaw', which sees a cat revenge itself on a callous man in a most brutal manner during a tourist trip to see the Iron Maiden in Nuremburg. 'Death in the Wings' is a tale of revenge that makes great use of the theatrical milieu in which Stoker spent the most productive period of his life.

Then there is the 'Criminal Star' which should be placed with those stories which are just extended black jokes but which rises above that level with a rather cruel portrayal of a great actor, Wolseley Gartside, and provides one of the earliest representations of a cynical Press agent that I have come across. That the 'great actor' was Irving writ more fantastic is scarcely to be doubted and it is testament to their friendship and either Irving's sense of humour or thick skin that Stoker, as his General Manager, got away with it. This was, however, after some 26 years of close association when liberties might be taken.

This brings us back to the relationship between Stoker and Irving. In his main Introduction and in the short but informative introduction to each story, Peter Haining, the Editor, shows us how this relationship and the stories and anecdotes shared in the after performance Beefsteak Room informed Stoker's literary imagination at every stage. Without Irving and his table, we are unlikely to have been given Dracula.

Touring also played its role with strong dollops of Irish and American local culture derived from Stoker's patrimony in the first case and theatrical tours to the East Coast cities and the hinterland in the second. Stoker enjoys writing for an American popular audience even if his portrayal of cowboys discussing Shakespeare in one of the 'Midnight Tales' seems distinctly fantastic.

A word should be put in for the scholarship of the late Haining who was a one person literary industry, producing popular and cheap anthologies about the highways and byways of English horror and fantasy for many years that probably did more to keep these literary traditions alive for later generations than any number of tenured academics.

Perhaps only S.T.Joshi's sustained work on Lovecraft and on 'high literary' horror and fantasy and arguably Glen Cavaliero's 'The Supernatural & English Fiction' have done so much for its survival in the back lists of paperback publishers today.

Haining met his usual high standards of editorship for the specialist publishers Peter Owen in 1990 when this collection appeared. He died in 2007 at the age of 67, having produced or edited a prodigious 170 books in his lifetime. Of course, he could be controversial and was not always 'right' by any means - he was a journalist rather than an academic - but his achievement was formidable.