Researches In The Quinazoline Group ..

One believes, after reading Dracula, that Stoker left no stone unturned as he researched the project. Is it so far-fetched to believe that he might have read Polidori's novel, have been excited by the subject matter, and determined to write a better book? I like to believe this might be so, much as I like to believe that Polidori really did crib his idea from Lord Byron. That would make Byron the literary grandfather of the legendary Count, who boasts early on to Jonathan Harker that he drove the Turks from Transylvania . . . and Byron himself died while aiding the Greek insurgents against the Turks in 1824, eight years after the gathering with the Shelleys and Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was a death of which the Count himself would have greatly approved. 5 All tales of horror can be divided into two groups: those in which the horror results from an act of free and conscious will-a conscious decision to do evil-and those in which the horror is predestinate, coming from outside like a stroke of lightning ...»