In naming his THE BEDSIDE, BATHTUB & ARMCHAIR COMPANION TO DRACULA, author Mark Dawidziak forgot one important reading destination: the toilet. To make the most of every minute of every day, what better place is there to read issues of ESQUIRE, chapters from cheap paperbacks and books like this, filled as it is with bite-sized articles?
A lifelong fan of Bram Stoker’s horror classic, Dawidziak takes the short-attention-span approach to covering nearly every aspect one could think of surrounding the book and its litany of spin-offs, imitators and spoofs. Corny pun ahead: If you’re at all into vampire lit, you’ll wanna sink your teeth into it. (Bah-dum-dum.)
Initial chapters — or “chapterettes,” as the case may be — focus on Stoker’s life, DRACULA’s publication and other bloodsucker books of the era that may have inspired him. As with the rest of this work, these portions are filled with fascinating bits of trivia that casual readers may not already have known, including the theory that Stoker died from syphilis, having sought sex outside his sexless marriage, and that the novel almost was issued as THE UN-DEAD.
Then you get a little more history lessons, including info on Vlad the Impaler, Shakespearean references in DRACULA and a map of all the locations involved in the story. I could do without the chapter-by-chapter summary of the novel, and did, quickly skipping to several brief essays examining its themes — primarily of a sexual nature, of course.
Dawidziak dispels the notion that Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest” was the excised first chapter of DRACULA (intended second chapter was more like it), and then gets into the various multimedia incarnations of the world’s most famous Transylvanian, from stage to screen (and records and radio and comics and Aurora models).
Two of the must-read pieces count down 10 “landmark” TV vampire portrayals and name the 10 “best Dracula movies.” You may be able to guess half of them, but some of his other choices are surprising. To top things off, there’s even a crossword puzzle, but being drawn and numbered by hand, it looks rather amateurish, and that’s too bad, given how professionally illustrated the rest of the book is, full of period drawings and still photographs.
Continuum Books has applied the BEDSIDE, BATHTUB & ARMCHAIR formula to several beloved books and authors, and they’re a lot of fun for fans of any given volume’s particular focus. It helps when an author like Dawidziak harbors enormous enthusiasm for the subject, because it’s infectious. —Rod Lott
