I’m writing this in the
courtyard of Castle Dracula.
I’ve
waited my whole
life to write those words in a nonfiction essay.
The low westering
sunlight slants down through
the distant, forbidding vista of the blue-green
mist-shrouded Carpathian Mountains, edging the
rough cobblestones and the
stone-cut mullioned
windows of the ancient castle with blood-tinted
late-afternoon shadows that seem oddly patient,
though somehow hungry.
Not bad, if I may say so myself. I like it. A little over-the-top, a little purple, but then again, horror fiction is one literary genre where a touch of the grape isn’t just forgivable, it’s actually encouraged.
The thing is, it
happened.
I was there. It’s nonfiction.
I wrote the
above
paragraphs on May 9, 2004, in Bran village, in
Transylvania. They are paraphrased from some notes in my
journal, written specifically for this
essay, which
would be crafted many months later.
My literary
intention in
writing them was to see if I could take the
elements around me—the village, the
courtyard of Castle Bran, the mountains, the sunset—and merge the
journalist’s
eye for detail with the horror
writer’s inner eye for color and atmosphere
through the power of imagination.
The facts are
technically
accurate: The sun was setting, the Carpathians
were blue-green,
the land is largely forgotten, and the soil
of Transylvania has seen
more bloodshed than most in
Europe.
I was in search of answers—all of them
journalistic and pertaining
to the film I was there to
cover for the magazine that had flown me halfway
across the
world. None of the questions
were about vampires. Whether
the shadows seemed “hungry” or not is a
matter of
artistic vision, and since I wrote it, I am
the ultimate authority.
That’s the magic of the
writing craft, and one of the gifts of
imagination—to bring a waking dream to
life on
the page.
If I say they
were
hungry, then they were hungry.
In the popular
imagination, Castle Bran has become the de facto
“Castle Dracula,” one of the
seats of
power of the 15th-century Wallachian prince, Vlad the
Impaler, whose
historical identity was the
genesis of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula,
published in 1897. I first read it in 1971, when I was
9 years old.
My mother started
me on
this twilit road with the grisly “bedtime
stories” of the Brothers Grimm,
replete with ogres
and demons and ancient wind-blasted castles where
witches
dwelt. I graduated to British fantasy writers
like Alan Garner, then to
English ghost stories of the M.R.
James school, and American horror comics.
Laced
throughout were the Christopher Lee Dracula films I
adored, among the
best of the Hammer Films oeuvre. I
read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at
our
villa outside of Geneva when my father was posted to the
United Nations
there in the mid ’70s, learning
early what I would later rediscover upon
rereading
Dracula in Transylvania in 2004—that
there is portentous
power in experiencing a writer’s
work by reading it in the milieu in which it
was set.
Nonfiction and
essays
have largely comprised my professional
writer’s life to date, but I have
managed to
make horror fiction my avocation, not only with my own
horror
fiction but with the Queer Fear anthology
series, the first collections
of horror stories to
have gay protagonists and themes as a matter of
course.
I’m a proud member of both PEN and The
Horror Writers Association.
Being a queer
horror
writer is a lot like coming out a second time.
Readers, editors, and friends
see you one of two ways: They
either regard you as a spooky fellow
whose
predilection for things that undulate by moonlight is
an amusing,
endearing jape, or they see a massive
incongruity between what they
think of as your
“serious” literary work—articles,
essays, reviews,
collections—and this weird shit you seem
to love. I occasionally feel the
pressure to disavow
my horror work as literarily unserious, as though
I
couldn’t possibly be thought of as a serious
writer if I didn’t.
Writing is either good
writing, or it is
bad writing. I don’t acknowledge the barriers
of genre, and
neither do the writers I most admire.
Horror, like desire, is a
visceral emotion. Anything that makes a
reader
“feel” those emotions that society would
rather leave behind closed
doors is bound to make these
prim worthies uncomfortable.
Back in May 2004
I was on
assignment in Bucharest for Fangoria, the
American horror film magazine
of record, for which I
have been writing for nearly 20 years. My editor,
Tony
Timpone, has become a great friend and confidant over the
years, and since
1987 he has sent more fun my way than
any journalist has the right to expect. I
was covering
the filming of Seed of Chucky, written and
directed by out
director Don Mancini and starring two
gay icons, Jennifer Tilly and John
Waters. A group of us
from the production had chartered a minivan and
departed
from the Bucharest Marriott, an oasis of
Eastern European luxury that bordered
on
vulgarity, to make the occasionally bumpy day trip
“deep into
the heart of Transylvania,”
as Roman Polanski wrote in the screenplay of
1967’s
The Fearless Vampire Killers.
My fellow
travelers were
superb company. As difficult as it was to get
into the “vampire mind-set” with
the
van’s radio playing Blondie’s “Heart
of Glass” and other great hits of
decades past while
we swapped film, travel, and boyfriend anecdotes, we
did see
genuine Transylvanian peasants with goiters,
driving oxcarts; and gypsies and
wild dogs
everywhere—just like the movies—through the
windows.
As we left
metropolitan
Bucharest, the land became flatter and more
sparse, until we began to climb
into the mountains. Great
fields of dark earth gave way to soaring rock
and
black-green pine forests. The air grew cold and clear.
Here and there we
drove through villages where
humble-looking wooden houses were interspersed
with stern,
rigorous municipal architecture. In the distance every
now and
then, we would catch a glimpse of a monastery
or a sinister-looking castle
jutting out from a
mountain ledge sometimes—delightfully—shrouded
in mist.
Given the loathing many
Romanians feel for
the co-opting and casting of their national hero Vlad
the
Impaler as a vampire horror staple, we kept the
delight largely to ourselves.
Everywhere
wandered the
ubiquitous Romanian street dogs, mute victims
of Ceausescu’s savage uprooting
and forced
diaspora of their owners.
When the late
dictator
appropriated the homes of ordinary Romanian citizens in
order to use
the land to construct what would later be
acknowledged as grotesque monuments
to his
megalomania, families were forced to settle in
government-owned city
apartments that forbade pets.
Abandoned, the dogs are
Romania’s
“other” orphans. They interbreed and wander
freely along the
treacherous roads by the tens of
thousands. The ones that survive form a
concurrent
Romanian population to the human one. During my stay in
Bucharest, a
good day was seeing only one dead dog along the
side of the road as I was
chauffeured to the studio. A
bad day would be nearly unthinkable to the
average
modern North American city dweller, especially a dog
owner.
Midway thorough
the
journey our driver stopped the van and sauntered over
to a group of gypsies
standing in front of a store to ask
them directions to Castle Bran. The gypsies
suddenly
became agitated, and an exchange of rapid-fire
Romanian exploded
between them and our driver.
As we
watched, our driver
raised his hands and waved them
away. The gypsies lurched after him, keening
and
wailing and crossing themselves. He jumped into the
driver’s seat of the
van and slammed the door,
locking it. Inserting the key into the ignition,
he
put the van into reverse, gunned the engine, and
swerved away from the
gypsies, who were by now spitting on
the ground and glaring sullenly at our
departure.
“What were
they saying?”
queried one of my traveling companions,
turning her head and looking back. The
whole spectacle
had been quite dramatic, and we were all by now
aroused from
our travel-induced torpor and quite taken
with the entire passionate exchange.
“They are
wanting money,”
said our driver, manifesting the
urban Romanian’s contempt
for
gypsies. “I have not given money. Gypsies
angry.”
Nonsense, I said
to myself with a private smile. They were saying,
“For the love of God, stay away from
the
castle!”
After an hour or
so we
parked, turned off the radio, and stepped out into
the cold wind to stretch our
legs. We stood on the edge of a
desolate stretch of highway. The fields were
dead and
yellow, life not yet returned to them after the savage
winter, and the Carpathian Mountains in the
distance seemed cruel and
implacable, though no less
majestic for their cruelty.
I listened to the
wind,
closed my eyes, and tried to dream of Dracula.
For a moment, the
world
as I knew it vanished. I heard Jonathan
Harker’s calèche clattering along the
Borgo
Pass through spectral blue fire on
Walpurgisnacht, and the distant baying of
wolves.
Then the dream
vanished
as quickly as it had come, reality closing over
the dark obsidian stone of
fantasy as surely as the surface
of a bright green lake.
And yet, later, the
moment
occurred again, this time after our arrival at the
castle. With a sense
of reverent pilgrimage, I split
off from the group and went to explore the
rugged, gloomy
castle on my own.
Momentarily, blissfully free from tourists, I sat on a rough-hewn wooden bench in the
courtyard and
looked up. I closed my eyes and again
summoned my waking dream of “the land
beyond the
forest,” the Transylvania of myth and legend
that I’ve carried in my
head and heart since I
was a very young boy.
“5
May.—I must have been asleep, for certainly
if I had
been fully awake I must have noticed the approach to
such a remarkable
place,” wrote Jonathan Harker
in
his journal, describing his arrival at Castle Dracula.
“In the gloom, the courtyard looked of considerable
size, and as
several dark ways led from it under the
great round arches it perhaps seemed
bigger than it
really is.”
The sudden
arrival of a
clutch of hearty beaming white-legged German
tourists in black socks and
sandals wielding cameras snapped
me out of my reverie. I opened my journal,
made a few
notes, then gathered up my things and went to join my
friends.
Ultimately, it
didn’t
matter to me that Bran village had
become something of a mitteleuropa “Dracula
Disneyland” with peasants and gypsies hawking
bread and cheese and
everything Dracula-related to
tourists who were there to celebrate Stoker’s
vampire
count who never was.
Or that after
visiting
the tomb of Vlad the Impaler on the monastery
island of Snagov a few days
later, the “silver
crucifix” I'd bought to commemorate the occasion
began to glow
in the dark—and not because of the
presence of anything unholy.
No, what mattered
is
that, as I gazed across the fields at whose edge the
brackish marsh water
lapped the muddy shores of Snagov
Island, I was able to remember the
island’s
gruesome history, and its legends. Over the centuries
it had been put
to a series of grisly
purposes—prisons, torture chambers, the site of
monstrous
impalements, many supervised by the
inhabitant of that elaborate Byzantine
crypt beyond the line
of trees at my back.
I was able to
close my
eyes and see a storm coming in over the water, lightning flickering at the
center of boiling, tenebrous
clouds in a sky gone black and violent. Behind me,
in
my waking dream, loomed the rain-lashed medieval
monastery that allegedly
contained the last earthly
remains of a fiend who many believed was immortal.
I found that even
after
I opened my eyes and blinked in the sunlight,
Snagov Island was nowhere I would
want the dark to catch me.
Plural identities, plural
realities.
Imagination.
For a writer, they’re
powerful tools. For a horror writer, they’re the air we breathe.
Before leaving
Castle
Bran that May afternoon, I ran my fingers
lightly along the stone walls in
tribute to the boy I was in
1971. I committed them to memory—again, not
without
a pilgrim’s veneration.
I won’t
forget the
feeling of that rough surface of Dracula’s
castle beneath my fingers as the sun
went down, or my
rediscovery of the secret doorway in my mind that had
swung
inward with the soft click of memory.
I knew well the
ancient
thing that waited for me inside.
After all, I
was
nourished on blood.
