Miami Fox Publishing again injects new life into old literature with another Bram Stoker classic – this time Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, which includes The Burial of the Rats, A Dream of Red Hands and A Gipsy Prophecy.
When Bram Stoker first gave his publisher, Archibald Constable & Company, a copy of the novel The Un-Dead (later Dracula), the author from Dublin introduced the world to his blood-sucking count in the only way he knew how, by beginning the conversation with the startling claim that, “This story is based on fact,” and in what is believed to be the original preface to the manuscript discovered in the Icelandic translation of the novel, Stoker went even further by writing, “I am quite convinced that there is no doubt whatever that the events here described really took place, however unbelievable and incomprehensible they might appear at first sight.”
Depending on your perspective, this contention is either a disturbing mystery that demands deeper inspection or a clever ruse – a pre-watershed marketing gimmick that has since been reused by Hollywood over and over. Stoker’s publisher was apparently so disturbed by the claim that he told Stoker he wouldn’t publish the book, in part because Jack the Ripper was still at large, and he was concerned that the claims made by the writer would provoke mass hysteria. Ultimately, Stoker and his publisher compromised, and the writer agreed to cut most of the preface and some hundred pages of the manuscript down to size. One of those deleted chapters is now known to be Dracula’s Guest, the first chapter, which follows Jonathan Harker on a visit to Munich before leaving for Transylvania.