Books

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Watch You Bleed: The Saga Of Guns ‘N’ Roses, by Stephen Davis

First it was Slash’s autobiography, cleverly titled Slash. Now it’s Stephen Davis’s latest entry into the rock bio sweepstakes, Watch You Bleed: The Saga of Guns N’ Roses. And I’m even listening to Chinese Democracy right now. I haven’t given this much attention to Guns N’ Roses since 1991, when I was driving around in my 1987 Toyota Celica with my “best of” the Use Your Illusion discs blaring out at top volume.

As rock biographies go, Watch You Bleed has enough debauchery to satisfy even the most jaded rock fans. Axl’s nuts, Slash, Izzy, and Steven are junkies, Duff’s a drunk, Dizzy’s wondering what on earth he’s doing on stage with these guys. Youth and good genes are the only reasons any of these guys are still alive. Their intake of both legal and illegal substances is legendary. I mean, come on, Duff’s pancreas ruptured causing third degree burns to his guts…that’s some serious indulgence. And Slash died a couple of times (he got better).

Watch You Bleed does a very good job of describing the Los Angeles music scene from which the Gunners emerged. But though they came from the same scene as bands like Poison, Guns were never really a part of that scene. They lived a life of total squalor, selling drugs to get the money to buy more drugs, using women to get them places to sleep and food to eat. The picture of the guys in this band that emerges is that none of these guys were the kind of people you wanted to associate with if you had even the slightest sense of normalcy in your life. These were genuinely bad guys, and the music they did reflected it: gritty, angry, determined, violent, and real. “Talk dirty to me,” sang Poison as they pranced around the stage, looking like girls playing dress up, mugging for the camera. “You’re in the jungle, baby/You’re gonna die,” countered Axl, face contorted in a very unphotogenic grimace of pure rage and adrenaline.

That first Guns album, the timeless Appetite For Destruction, remains their testament. They were a street gang at the time they recorded it. Largely homeless, broke, strung out, and carrying a massive chip on their collective shoulder, the resulting music is a roller coaster ride of whiplash riffs and Axl’s vicious, sometimes unearthly, vocals. At a time when the boys of Los Angeles were dressing like the girls of the Sunset Strip mall and doing anything they could to get on MTV and the radio, Guns filled an album with songs many of which couldn’t be played on either format because of FCC regulations. The album sold over 15 million copies based on a lot of airplay for the safest songs: the lovely “Sweet Child o’ Mine” and the anarchic “Paradise City” I have no doubt that there were more than a few people who purchased the album for “Sweet Child” and were…um…shocked by the casual misogyny and brutality of “It’s So Easy.”

But damn, that album rocked. Followed by the hodgepodge of Gn’R Lies, half bogus live tracks, and half stunningly good acoustic songs, this was clearly a band bigger than the stupid scene they came from. I can still remember hearing “Patience” for the first time and being so surprised and happy that the first verse wasn’t followed by the usual hard rock bombast of the “power ballads” that were all over the radio. No, “Patience” stayed an acoustic ballad, and it was awesome.

Stephen Davis does a very good job of tracing these years of forming the band, getting the record contract, and heading out on tour as an opening act for bands like Aerosmith. I was very surprised to learn that Guns didn’t do a major tour as a headliner until the Use Your Illusion tour, despite being arguably the biggest band on the planet in 1988 and 1989. Despite all the depravity going on behind the scenes, the early Guns were a juggernaut. By the time of the Illusion albums and tour, the excess had taken a severe toll and Axl, who was surprisingly non-toxic (well, less toxic) in his habits but completely poisonous in his attitude, was going off the rails in a cataclysmic collision of therapy, arrogance, paranoia, and megalomania.

Davis gives all credit to Appetite and Lies, despite spending a lot of time on decrying the lyrical content of Axl’s “One In A Million” (from Lies). Davis never misses an opportunity to wag a politically correct finger at Axl for his decidedly non-PC views and turns what was a small controversy into a seemingly major debacle.

Unfortunately Davis also slams the Illusion albums mercilessly. I’m the first to admit that there is a whole lot of filler spread out on those two discs, and there are some songs that should have never seen the light of day (“Get In The Ring,” “My World,” and their atrocious cover of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”). But the highlights of the Illusion albums are standout tracks. From the opening salvo of “Right Next Door To Hell” to the closing fever dream of “Coma” the first of the Illusion discs has more good songs and is a more consistent disc. The second, with “Civil War,” "Yesterdays," “Estranged,” “Breakdown” among others has some of the best songs, but also the most filler. Between the two discs, you can make one solid album that rivals Appetite For Destruction.

The book came out before the release of Chinese Democracy, and ends with the tormented story of that album, asking the musical question “Will it ever come out?” Well it has and, as Bart Simpson might say, “Meh.”

Where Davis fails miserably in this book, and in his others, are the errors of fact. The book is full of little things that are just flat out wrong. Paul Stanley is the bass player of Kiss? The Replacements were "the best new band of 1990"? That’ll be news to all those people who had been listening to them since 1981. There are dozens of examples, and I usually find many of these whenever I read one of his books. I get the impression that Davis is most interested in telling a savage tale in his books, and that he is more motivated by his love of the sales that sensational stories engender than he is by any love of the music these people create. Look at the subjects for his books: Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Jim Morrison, the Rolling Stones, Guns…the most drug-addled, groupie-shagging reprobates on the planet get the Davis treatment, and his books linger lovingly over every stained sheet and discarded needle. Music is always secondary to a good overdose story. It caught my eye in Watch You Bleed that Guns is frequently compared to other bands: Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, the Stones, the Doors…hmmm, all subjects of previous Davis bios. While his research about the band itself is thorough, I get the impression that his knowledge of the broader history of rock music is fairly limited.

It’s a good story, told well, but I have a feeling the author is in it for the money, and that’s not very rock ‘n’ roll.

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The Bonfire Of The Vanities, by Tom Wolfe

Okay, let’s give this one another shot. About a week ago I wrote a lengthy review of The Bonfire Of The Vanities in this very spot. It was brilliant and full of insight, possibly the finest critique of a major novel that anyone has ever read. However, when I clicked the "Post" button to put my words of wisdom on the site, the entire process hiccupped and my review was gone, lost in the cyber ether. This has forced me to write this new, substandard review that pales in comparison to the one I originally wrote which you, Constant Reader (whoever you are) will never see. Pity, really.

I kid, of course, but isn’t that what this is all about? Vanity? Yes, I believe it is.

Tom Wolfe is the acclaimed writer from the New Journalism that came of age in the 1960s (or maybe earlier…not my area of expertise). His books run the subject matter gamut from the beginnings of the space program (probably his most famous book, The Right Stuff) to the LSD-addled nightmare party of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test). But it took him over 20 years of writing before he set pen to paper in the service of fiction. The resulting first novel, originally published serially in Rolling Stone, was The Bonfire Of The Vanities.

I first attempted to read this book back in 1990, but I started grad school when I was only 100 pages into it, and the book was placed on the shelf where it was promptly forgotten. Every once in a while I’d see the spine and think, "I really should read that…but not right now." Well, a few weeks ago I had nothing else to read and there it was.

I’m curious to know what my reaction would have been in 1990, when the events and people so lovingly fictionalized here were still playing out in the newspapers. Bonfire is the quintessential "New York in the 1980s" novel. What’s fascinating to me is that the beginnings of the novel first appeared in 1984 in Rolling Stone, and the full book was not finished and published until 1987. Yet Wolfe seems to have caught the New York of the late 1980s in his crystal ball.

With the exception of the Reverend Bacon, who is clearly modeled after either Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson, it doesn’t appear that the characters are supposed to represent actual people. Still, the characters are all familiar to anyone who grew up reading the New York newspapers and watching Live at Five for the local news.

There is Sherman McCoy, bond trader par excellence,who refers to himself without the slightest trace of irony as a Master Of The Universe. This title belongs to him because of his salary, his nice wife and daughter, and his smoking hot, man-eating mistress. By his side in good times and better times is Maria Luskin, the voracious mistress who is so wrapped up in herself that her vision extends only as far as the bridge of her own nose.

Nominally, the plot hinges on what happens when Sherman and Maria, Manhattanites to the core, get lost in that urban jungle that is the Bronx. The road is blocked, Sherman gets out of the Mercedes to move the obstruction and is approached by two young black men; he panics, Maria slides into the driver’s seat and, in the ensuing escape, lightly hits one of the black men who falls and hits his head. Two days later he’s in a coma and the police, at the urging of Reverend Bacon and a political hack Bronx DA,are looking for the driver of the silver Mercedes that ruthlessly slammed into and abandoned the young honor student. What they are really looking for is the Great White Defendant, and by luck they find him.

Wolfe tantalizingly never answers the questions that lie at the heart of the book. Were the two young men attempting to rob Sherman and Maria? Or were they really innocents who were just trying to help? There is plenty of evidence that points in either direction.

The injury to Henry Lamb is the sacrifice needed to light the bonfire. Over the next 500 pages or so, the preening Sherman McCoy is reduced to suicidal thoughts, abandoned by his wife, abandoned by his mistress (the woman who is really responsible), forced out of his job. He has gone from being a Master of The Universe to a shell of a man, someone who no longer knows his own identity.

But Sherman’s vanity is not the only one ready for consummation in the flames. Every bit as bad as Sherman is the Reverend Bacon, a charlatan and race hustler who exploits the Lamb family for his own ends. There is also Larry Kramer, the assistant DA charged with prosecuting McCoy. Kramer is so vain he flexes his neck muscles before attractive female jurors, like a peacock spreading his feathers before a tantalized peahen. There is Peter Fallow, the alcoholic British journalist who makes a name for himself with innuendo-laced articles about the case and who stretches the definition of objectivity well past the breaking point. There is Abe Weiss, the Bronx DA who cares only about re-election and sees McCoy as his ticket.

These people, and many others populating this massive book, are all too familiar to this New York boy who spent his young adulthood reading about the likes of Tawana Brawley, Al Sharpton, Lester Maddox, Ed Koch, Robert Morgenthau,  Michael Griffith, and Bernie Goetz. Yeah, NYC was  a real toddlin’ town back then, as we kept climbing towards over 2000 murders a year.

McCoy is hounded, even after the initial case is dismissed. Nearly everyone else manages to escape.  Peter Fallow wins a Pulitzer,  Maria flees the country and gets off scot-free. Only the judge who did the right thing by dismissing the case is burned in the bonfire. By doing the right thing, he seals his re-election chances: he now has none.

But McCoy strangely manages to find himself through his travails (for which he is, at least partially, responsible). It is implied in a bogus New York Times article that ends the book that McCoy is once again involved with his wife on at least a superficial level, and has gotten in touch with the man he used to be before he became a Master Of The Universe.

On trial yet again (this time because Henry Lamb has, a year later, died) for vehicular manslaughter, the fourth trial for the same incident, McCoy seems to have found something in himself in his new role as the Great White Defendant.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities is a time piece now. It is nearly perfect in its evocation of New York City politics in the mid-80s. Anyone reading it will be able to see the bloody core of racial politics and the small-minded hobgoblins that infest politics like so many tapeworms.  Anyone from the tri-state area who is my age or older will pull a whole different level of appreciation. The characters may or may not be modeled on any particular individuals, but we know who they are. We spent a decade reading about them in the New York Post.

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Slash, by Slash and Anthony Bozza

As a writer, Slash makes for an awesome guitar player. It’s clear from the style of the book that Slash never actually set pen to paper, but told his "co-writer" Anthony Bozza his life story. Said life story was then written in such a way as to make it seem like you were sitting in a living room listening to Slash give his spiel.

Slash is a thoroughly entertaining rock autobiography, full of tales of debauchery: decadent, promiscuous sex, drug abuse, alcoholism, band in-fighting, great rock and roll music. It’s all there, in excess.

The Guns ‘n’ Roses/Velvet Revolver guitarist comes off as a generally nice guy, the kind of guy with whom you’d probably enjoy sitting down and talking about music. He also comes off as a thoroughly reprehensible human being, the kind of guy you would kill if he tried to date your sister.

The book handles some things better than the average rock bio. For example, Slash discusses his musical influences freely. He talks about his great love of Aerosmith, and recounts times when he and various members of Guns ‘n’ Roses would sit around listening to records. Personally, I find this stuff interesting. Too many rock biographies make it seem that the star in question emerged from the earth fully formed. Any successful musician has spent more hours than you can even imagine listening to other people’s music, but this is one of the few rock bios where this passive act of listening to music is described with great fondness. At one point, shortly after hearing Aerosmith’s Rocks for the first time, Slash hooked up with a girl he had been eyeing all night long, but when they got back to her place, he ignored her in order to listen to her copy of Rocks over and over again. She finally kicked him out.

The heart of the book is Slash’s struggles with drugs and drink. He spent most of the last twenty-odd years in a completely altered state. His heroin use was sporadic in the sense that he would be deeply addicted for lengthy periods, and then quit for equally lengthy periods, but his love of alcohol was never very far away. At the end of the book, he proudly speaks of his recovery, but the reader is left to wonder just how long that recovery will last.

In his riveting and harrowing autobiography, Long Time Gone, David Crosby paints the most terrifying picture of drug addiction I’ve ever read. Anyone ever tempted to try cocaine should be forced to read Long Time Gone first. Crosby, too, had made a recovery and it was believable. His regrets over the lost years and broken relationships were apparent on every page. In Slash, the tales of madness and drugs are told in a tone that approaches nostalgia. "Heroin sure is a terrible thing," Slash seems to be saying, "but it sure is fun." Alcohol abuse, too, largely gets a pass from any sort of judgment. You can almost sense that Slash is clean and sober, but feels that he can go back to his former ways at any moment.

Of course, a major plot point for the book is the second leading man. If Slash is the main star of the book, it is Axl Rose who neatly steals the scenes in which he appears. Slash is an addict and a born troublemaker, but Axl is a sociopath. Slash does a good job of portraying Axl in a relatively fair light. Axl’s talent and drive are never questioned, and the early years of the band are portrayed as a friendlier, more respectful, grouping. It is only after fame starts to rear its ugly head that the Axl we all know and loathe starts to come into his own. Concerts delayed for hours, riots started, band members fired, fans abused…now that’s Guns ‘n’ f’in’ Roses!

Fans of real, gritty, dirty rock music owe a great deal of debt to Slash. As a guitar player, he almost single-handedly killed off that Eddie Van Halen hammer-on school of guitar wanking that every blow-dried pretty boy with pouty lips, bedroom eyes, and a closet full of hair spray was riding to the top of the MTV playlists. In a particularly telling anecdote, Slash recounts the first time he heard Eddie Van Halen play. Like every other guitar slinger on the planet, he was dutifully and justifiably blown away. However, he continues, while all the other guitar players in L.A. started practicing their hammer-ons, Slash was listening to the band Van Halen, and trying to pick out the subtleties in Eddie’s playing…the stuff that all the pretty boys missed. Slash loved Van Halen’s playing, but considered himself more from the Chuck Berry school. It shows. Slash can certainly go on a little too long in some of his solos, but generally speaking he is one of the most tasteful heavy rock guitar players to ever play the instrument.  Nobody, except for Eddie Van Halen and some of the leftover wankers from that era of heavy metal (helloooooo Yngwie!), plays in that style anymore, and that’s in no small part due to the fact that Guns ‘n’ Roses became so huge with a guitar player that didn’t play in that style. So thanks for that, Slash.

Slash gives you a very good look at the inner workings of one of the biggest bands of the last 25 years, but in the end it’s not necessarily the most reliable look. By his own admission, Slash was out of his skull for almost all of the incidents described in the book. He apparently kept a diary of sorts in day planners that he used as sources for the book, but who knows how reliable those are? Alcohol and drugs not only destroy your memory of things that happened twenty years ago, they also taint your perception of things that are happening in the here and now. A perfect example is Slash’s story of how Axl refused to go onstage one night until all the band members signed away their rights to the name Guns ‘n’ Roses. Slash recounts that they didn’t know whether or not Axl would go onstage, so they signed the contract. Is the story true? Sorry, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Axl rightly points out that such a contract would have been thrown out of court since it was signed under duress. Score one for the sociopath…he may be bonkers, but he’s more believable on this point.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I plan on reading the Stephen Davis Guns ‘n’ Roses bio, Watch You Bleed. Davis has his own issues, not the least of which is a taste for the sensational, but it will hopefully provide a more reliable presentation of what really happened in the G ‘n’ R camp.

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Gods And Generals, by Jeff Shaara

In The Killer Angels, author Michael Shaara wrote what many consider to be the greatest novel of the Civil War ever written. When you consider that this company includes both Gone With The Wind and The Red Badge Of Courage, you realize you’re talking about some pretty heady company.

After Shaara died, his son Jeff picked up the mantle and began writing books in the same format and style as his father. Jeff Shaara doesn’t get a lot of points for originality since his style is virtually indistinguishable from that of his father, but he does score with his novels nonetheless.

Gods And Generals is Jeff Shaara’s prequel to his father’s The Killer Angels. The latter book focused entirely on three days in July 1863…the three bloodiest days in American history, at a tiny town in Pennsylvania that has become synonymous with all that is horrific in, and all that is honorable about, war: Gettysburg.

Gods And Generals starts just as the Civil War is about to begin. Fort Sumter has not been shelled, but war is in the air and seems inevitable. The book ends as the Southern commander, Robert E. Lee, begins his march north towards Pennsylvania and the turning point of the war. In between are battles at Harper’s Ferry, two battles at Bull Run (Manassas), Antietam and, acting as the centerpiece of the book, the horrible carnage of Fredericksburg and the confusion and incompetence that turned Chancellorsville into a humiliating Union defeat.

The battles are described with an historian’s eye for accuracy, and a storyteller’s eye for narrative. The problem with this book, and almost any book that attempts to describe the mass confusion generated by hundreds of thousands of men hurtling themselves at each other, is that there is so much going on at any given time the narrative can become confusing. The Killer Angels was remarkably coherent, which may explain its reputation. Stephen Pressfield’s Gates Of Fire was also an amazingly detailed, yet easy-to-follow, view of the battle of Thermopylae. Ditto Stephen Harrigan’s brilliant novel of the titular battle in The Gates Of The Alamo. In Gods And Generals, the overall narrative is sometimes lost in the thirst for accuracy and the seeming need to cover all bases.

It’s difficult to criticize the book, however, because in general it is so well done. Shaara may be copying his father’s style, but he does so flawlessly. If the descriptions of troop movements are a little confusing, there are maps to help out. If it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference between many of the supporting characters, you can take solace in how well the main characters are drawn. I don’t know if there’s a finer portrayal of George Washington in fiction than in Jeff Shaara’s The Glorious Cause. In Gods And Generals, he applies the same fine brush to paint convincing portraits of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson especially, but also Joshua Chamberlain and Winfield Hancock on the Union side.

With Lee and Jackson, we feel the astonishment as one inept Union general after another blows one opportunity after another. What should have been a decisive Union victory at Chancellorsville, one that may even have ended the war two years and hundreds of thousands of lives earlier, instead becomes a panicked retreat from a vastly outnumbered Confederate force. What could have been a Union victory at Fredericksburg instead is handed to Lee’s forces on a silver platter: Lee’s forces sweep in and occupy the high ground while the Union forces are prevented by their leadership from crossing a shallow river because they don’t yet have pontoon bridges in place. Poor leadership on the Union side was so rife; it’s no surprise that Lee and Jackson genuinely believed that God was on the side of the South. One can only wonder what history would be like if Lincoln had not brought in Ulysses Grant to take over the Union forces.

There is talk early in the book about the why of the Civil War. As a college professor, Joshua Chamberlain pontificates about slavery as he makes his decision to enlist in the Army. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are both opposed to slavery, but view the encroaching war as an attack on the sovereignty of Virginia. For them, the issue is not slavery, but the right of individual states to make their own laws. These arguments largely disappear once the battles begin. I suppose that there is honesty in that. Contrary to what you’ll find in B-movies galore, my guess is that the average soldier rarely spends too much time debating the geopolitical events that landed him in a trench at Fredericksburg, or the Somme, or Bastogne, or Baghdad. But as a reader of a historical novel, it would have been good for Shaara to have the horrific battles of the Civil War placed in some context. Slavery was unquestionably the catalyst for the war and the main evil that the war was fought to address, but it was not the only issue. Without the exploration of these other issues, Lee’s and Jackson’s decision to take arms up in support of an institution they both abhorred seems odd.

As the war begins, many characters struggle with the idea of what to do. Many of the Southern military leaders were in the U.S. Army when hostilities erupted, and had to make a choice whether to stay loyal to the country, or their home state. Nowadays that seems like an odd thing about which to be conflicted, but at the time people considered themselves first off as citizens of their state, and secondly as citizens of the United States. In many ways, the Civil War was the bloody culmination of the debate between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Federalists won the debate in 1787, but Anti-Federalism was a way of life for many Americans outside of the immediate orbit of Washington, D.C., especially down South. The snake in the cotton fields of the South, of course, was slavery. While it was understandable that slavery was not outlawed by the Constitution when it was first crafted in 1787, the price of this compromise would be long and brutal.

A little more…not too much, lest it become tendentious…of the why of the war would have placed these combatants in the middle of a cause where they were fighting for what they believed was right, rather than subjecting them to the hail of musket fire and the end of the bayonet blade for reasons that many modern readers might find murky.

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Dracula, by Bram Stoker

For many years, I avoided reading Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel, Dracula. This is because many years ago I read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Perhaps it’s because I spent my childhood watching the old Universal horror films, perhaps because I was at an impressionable age when Count Chocula and Frankenberry were released, perhaps because I know that the origins of both books can be traced back to one seriously wasted night in Switzerland during the Year Without A Summer, but Dracula and Frankenstein have always been linked in my mind.

Frankenstein is not a fun book to read. It’s the product of an extremely clever 19-year-old mind. The prose is as dry as kindling, and there are scenes that are just laugh-out-loud bad. (The monster teaches himself to read when he finds a copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther? There’s that too clever 19-year-old again.) Not a lot happens in the book. Far from Boris Karloff’s hulking brute with the plugs in his neck, Shelley’s “monster” is a good-looking guy who wants to have lengthy philosophical debates with his creator. Dr. Frankenstein spends much of the book saying things like, “I am a wretched man for having created such a wretched creature and I am all the more wretched for wretchedly abandoning the wretched thing! Wretched!” Whenever I was asked if the book was any good, my reply was usually a simple, “Wretched!” Only H.P. Lovecraft’s incessant use of the non-descriptive cheating word “indescribable” matches Shelley’s use of this wonderful, but antiquated, word.

But Frankenstein is also a fascinating book. Whether she knew she was doing it or not (and I doubt she did), Mary Shelley created a myth that still resonates today. She was certainly aware that she was borrowing from mythology. Her subtitle, after all, is “The Modern Prometheus.” But instead of fire, Victor Frankenstein uses electricity to create life. At the time the book was written, the concept of electricity was fairly new and imbued with all sorts of possibilities, both positive and negative.

Shelley was writing a cautionary tale for the Enlightenment (this I strongly doubt she knew). Mary and her husband, the brilliant poet Percy, were champions of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, among the first generation to be raised in the aftermath. But even while they praised the Enlightenment ideals of reason and science, Mary Shelley was writing a tale warning against the idea of men taking on the powers of God. Frankenstein is among the first novels of the Enlightenment, and it is a tale of horror.

If you fast forward to the end of the 19th century, you will find that the Enlightenment fascination with electricity and science and reason no longer carries the same weight. In the years between Frankenstein and Dracula, Charles Darwin wrote The Origin of Species, which turned him into a literary and scientific rock star. Electricity had been replaced with genetics and blood. Clearly, a new horror was required for a new time.

Vampire myths are probably as old as mankind, and Dracula was not the first vampire novel. Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyr (concocted that same wasted night in Switzerland, and inspired by Lord Byron), the novel Varney the Vampyr, and even a lesbian vampire novella called Carmilla by Sheridan LeFanu, all preceded Dracula. But it was left to Abraham Stoker to write the classic vampire novel, Dracula. The name itself is now synonymous with vampirism.

Unlike Frankenstein, the writing in Dracula is almost breathless. The story hurtles along briskly and, even though the actual character of the Count disappears from the book about four or five chapters in and, for the duration of the novel, makes only slightly more appearances than Boo Radley for the rest of the book, the spirit of the vampire hovers over everything. It’s no small accomplishment to make a minor character the entire focus of a lengthy tale and make no mistake; Count Dracula is a minor character in his own book. The major characters are those hunting the elusive Count: the stalwart Jonathan Harker who unintentionally sets the events of the novel into motion; Harker’s wife, the pure of heart Mina; the grieving Lord Holmwood; the rogue Texan Quincey Morris; the psychologist Dr. Seward; and most of all Dr. Van Helsing, who is both a brilliant psychologist and a little cracked himself. Also figuring here is Lucy Westenra, the fiancé of Lord Holmwood who becomes the first victim of the Count on his arrival in England.

The story is well known. Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to work out a real estate deal with Count Dracula. While there, he becomes a prisoner and all too aware that something really bad is going on at the good Count’s castle. He is eventually freed and, by this time, quite mad. While Mina diligently searches for her missing betrothed, Dracula is on his way to England, courtesy of the real estate deal worked out for him by Harker. Once there, he attacks Lucy and eventually kills her. Lucy then rises from her grave to become the “bloofer lady” who kidnaps and kills small children. Van Helsing figures out what’s going on and, with help from his friends, kills Lucy once and for all by driving a stake through her heart, cutting off her head, and stuffing her mouth with garlic. The intrepid band of vampire killers then go in search of the Count who, unbeknownst to them, has turned his attentions to Mina. They eventually track down the Count, who flees back to Transylvania. Van Helsing and company follows him and eventually kills him in a very anti-climactic ending.

But it is what’s between the lines that is so fascinating here. Written in 1897 in Victorian England, there are scenes in this book that, with a word change or two, could have emerged from a letter to Penthouse. Jonathan Harker trembles with “dreadful anticipation” as three beautiful women go down on their knees in front of him. The passage that follows is a seduction scene, though because Harker is powerless to stop the women, it is also a rape scene. Jonathan Harker is about to be orally raped by the brides of Dracula, and he’s both terrified and cool with the whole idea. It is only the last second appearance of the Count, bearing strong words for his wives, and a half-smothered baby for them to snack on, that prevents the rape.

Similarly, when Lucy is having her blood drawn by the Count the description is that of a woman who is…well, orgasmic. It is not until the next day that Lucy appears weak and ill.

Harker’s guilt over the close encounter provides the thrust of the storyline. He writes of the incident, but prays Mina never sees it. Even though he was powerless to stop it, he seems to feel guilty of committing a sin of a sexual nature. He may not have been able to do anything to stop it, but the sin may be that he didn’t want to do anything to stop it. A foursome with three beautiful women was going to be the highlight of his trip to the Old Country. Realizing that he has sinned in spirit, if not in the flesh, his response is to go mad and get lost in the Transylvania countryside.

But the ramifications of his sin spread. Dracula goes to London. Mina’s cousin, the virginal, sweet Lucy is killed. Her Undead corpse then kills innocent children. Eventually, after Harker makes his way back to England and sanity, and marries Mina, the sin follows. Mina, too, becomes “infected” using Van Helsing’s word. It is the innocent women and children who must pay for Harker’s sin.

A quick look at the author shows a man who was very much a night owl, who slept during the day, who knew how to have a good time in the nightlife of 19th century London. In fact, that nightlife gave him the syphilis that later took his life. Was Dracula a metaphor for the disease that infected the author? Possibly. There is certainly little doubt that if Jonathan Harker had been sensible and stayed to himself within the castle walls as he was instructed to do, that many of the events that occurred would never have happened. Is it coincidence that Dracula chose to go after Harker’s friends and relatives? Surely not. London was a big city even then. Harker’s loved ones are paying the price for his dalliance with Dracula’s brides. The sin follows him, and infects those he cares about.

There is a question in “lit-crit” circles about whether or not Dracula is a romance of sorts. Certainly the popularity of the current Twilight saga is based on the notion of tween girls falling for dreamy vampire hunks. But whether the reaction of Dracula’s female victims, or Harker’s reaction to the brides, can be classified as erotic or, at least, sexual in nature, is something of a distraction to the larger point. Erotic, perhaps. Romantic, absolutely not. Dracula was a vampire and vampires are vicious, cruel, blood-thirsty monsters who seek death and turn the innocent into the demonic. If they happen to use time-honored seduction techniques (staring into the eyes, caressing the neck, etc), that really just makes them more evil. "I can love," Dracula says, but the love of a vampire is based on violence and death, consummated by a penetrative act that is a sick parody of affection and that leaves the recipient weaker and, eventually, either dead or monstrous.

Let the tweens reading Twilight suck on that.