desecrets | reading roundup part 1: oh worm?

In the past like 3 months I have read... so many Doctor Who novels. So many. (How did I end up here...?)

(To be specific I've read Terror of the Autons, The Claws of Axos, The Mind of Evil, The Daemons, The Sea Devils, Scream of the Shalka and Last of the Gaderene. Uh.)

I'll probably be posting my thoughts on those, but first off, the one thing I've read that's not a Doctor Who novel: For the past couple weeks, I've been slogging my way through The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker.

I did actually pick it up because of a Doctor Who audio (🙈), Trail of the White Worm, which is based on it. It's a very loose adaptation, making use of certain plot elements of Stoker's story, but obviously inserting Doctor Who characters and with a totally different plotline overall. It was fun, and it reminded me I had the original sitting around!

I had heard that White Worm was not considered among Stoker's best work (in fact I'm pretty sure I'd seen someone online say that it was terrible, but by that point I'd already bought it). But it's pretty short -- only 145 pages in my edition -- and I wanted something spooky to read for autumn. A lot of horror that gets called really bad ends up being goofy but fun, so I figured it might be one of those situations.

The thing about The Lair of the White Worm, though (as was explained to me in the very sympathetic introduction written by David Stuart Davies, of Bending the Willow fame among other things), is that it was written after Bram Stoker had suffered a stroke. That's part of the reason I'm still struggling through it: now that I know that, it would feel kind of churlish to DNF it on the grounds of "Not good enough".

The other reason is that I keep seeing the shades of the good book that this could have been.

The premise isn't bad! The book opens with young Australian Adam Salton being contacted by his grand-uncle, who has no other heirs and is anxious for Adam to come and live with him on his ancient estate in England, so that they can get to know each other and Adam can inherit him in future. On arrival he's greeted by his grand-uncle (whom he calls uncle) and the uncle's old friend, Mr. de Salis, and they all get along like a house on fire. But it soon becomes apparent that some of the inhabitants of the old neighbouring estates are dabbling in sinister forces, and there's a monster on the loose.

There's kind of an English folk horror vibe, with an academic slant that reminds me of M.R. James: there's a lot of emphasis on the historicity of the surrounding area, with Mr. de Salis explaining to Adam how every people who have made their mark on English history, from the Celts to the Anglo-Saxons, have left traces in the landscape and in the local toponymy -- and in the fund of local legends. As a medievalist and a linguist, this shit is my jam. The concept of an ancient legend of a gigantic worm (or more properly, wyrm) is also 100% up my alley.

The problem is in the execution. For one thing, the prose is noticeably clunky in many places, so you get things like Sir Nathaniel looked graver and graver as the narration proceeded, and when Adam had stopped he remained silent for several minutes, before speaking. 'This is very grave. [...]', that could have been so easily caught by an editor.

The pacing has serious issues as well. At one point we're informed that Adam, off screen, discovered the lifeless body of a little girl by the side of the road earlier that day. This was no doubt intended as a dramatic reveal, but the effect is completely ruined by the fact that after coming home, instead of rushing to share this news, he makes inconsequential conversation for several pages, and when he finally does get round to it, the recounting is totally devoid of drama or even detail, while events that are objectively of less import to the plot are given several pages. What should have been one of the biggest reveals in the novel, the nature of the Worm, is delivered with minimal drama forty pages in, when the protagonists manage to deduce it and, despite it being patently supernatural, seem to take it completely in stride -- but it ultimately doesn't make much difference, because by the beginning of the next chapter, Adam seems to have forgotten all about it.

(The one upside to the bizarre pacing issue so far has been that it also impacts the love subplot between Adam and a girl from a nearby farm, and since I prefer my horror sans burgeoning Victorian romance, that suits me fine.)

Maybe the saddest thing is that the stroke seems to have affected Stoker's ability to employ any measure of subtlety, which means that the ultimately very misogynistic, bourgeois, and xenophobic fears which underlie the story conflict are pretty much shoved in your face unmasked. Of course, Dracula wasn't the subtlest thing in the world either when it came to Victorian anxieties about female sexuality and the dangers of the un-English etc etc, but Dracula is well-constructed enough to also work as a purely supernatural story. Conversely, White Worm at one point just slaps the reader with a summary of its villains as follows: That combination of forces -- the overlord, the white woman, and the black man. It's also incredibly blunt (and repetitive) in drawing continuous parallels between Druids, snakes, and evil women on the one hand, and Christians, doves, and virtuous women on the other, which is slowly driving me up the wall. It's unfortunate that White Worm actively invites comparisons with Dracula through its plot elements (for instance, when Adam discovers the young girl by the road, he sees a figure in white disappearing among the trees, which is strongly reminiscent of Lucy Westenra hunting children). Being regularly reminded of Stoker at his best only makes this harder to get through.

All of this isn't even getting into the descriptions of Oolanga, the unsympathetic Edgar Caswall's African servant, but it honestly suffices to say that they're unpleasant to read.

At this point, I don't know if it will get any better or if it will somehow get worse, but I'm going to try to finish it by the end of the month and then I can tick it off my list.