Suck, Baby, Suck Gimme Yer Head

BOOKS

DRACULA

by Bram Stoker

(various paperback editions, cheap)

IN SEARCH OF DRACULA

by Raymond T. McNally and

Radu Florescu

(Warner Paperback Library)

DRACULA:

A BIOGRAPHY OF VLAD TEPES

by Raymond T. McNally and

Radu Florescu

(Warner Paperback Library)

DREAM OF DRACULA

by Leonard Wolf

(Popular Library)

THE NATURAL HISTORY

OF THE VAMPIRE

by Anthony Masters

(G.P. Putnam & Sons)

After hobnobbing around with Parisian deco-mick Oscar Wilde, after sitting in on hundreds of medical mutilations, after being slavishly obsessed with actor Henry Irving, after gorging himself to the gills on slavic-teutonic superstitions, Bram Stoker spewed out Dracula, a masterwork of horror, erotica and psychic subterfuge. It’s a book that leads to obsession and yearnings after power, Nietzschian supermen overlords. Realism chocked so full it disintegrates into mumbor-jumbo surrealistica dispersing time and coherency, it’s a sock to the jaw that many never set yer hea’d right again. The thrall of the vampire is a total breakdown of order, total chaos sucking blood literally and the soul figuratively; for the soul, according to the medieval mind, is seated in the throat. Everyone from Camilla to Hitler to Manson to David Bowie, if you believe what’s being said in some circles, is a vampire-type.

Two effected by the detailia and factual trivia were scholars Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, who literally set out In Search of Dracula. One hundred miles off where Stoker placed him, McNally and Florescu found what’s left of his castle, and began piecing together the myth/ history of Vlad Tepes: the impaler, Dracula, a rabid warrior-hero prince of Romania whose warped idea of a good time was driving a spike through one person or several thousand for desert, and then leave ’em hanging to rot in the sun or be pecked to’ pieces by the crows. Vlad never killed them outright, just tortured and tore ’em apart so that their screams and groans were muzak for his meals.

Some of the impalings must have been a messy sigl^t, like whenever he tore a woman’s breast off and filled the gaping hole with the mother’s child’s head. Of course, McNally and Florescu admit that Vlad, or Dracula, would just have been a smalltime pervo were it not for his fictional namesake, so they include several chapters on Stoker, vampire legend, vampire literature, and the films. Theirs is the most complete filmography I’ve ever seen; they’ve even uncovered gems like Guess What Happend To Count Dracula?, which was made into three versions: GP, R, and XX in the form of a porno-great dubbed Does Dracula Suckl Did you know that the subtitle of Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers was Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck? And nowRay and Radu are back with a fleshed-out concentration on the real Dracula: 'A Biography of Vlad Tepes, figuring that if you loved the gross-outs that introduced Vlad in the earlier book, you’ll just be drooling for more.

Two other books focusing more specifically on the vampire mythology and how it eats its way into your heart are The Natural History of the Vampire, by Anthony-Masters, and Leonard Wolfs Dream of Dracula.

The Natural History of the Vampire and Dream of Dracula are two other books focusing more specifically on the vampire mythology and how it eats its way intoyour heart. Dream is paperbackhand even your local candy store is probably stocking it. Unfortunately it’s written in a kind of quasi-journalistic West Coast wowie zowie style which makes it too cute to swallow sometimes, but author Leonard Wolf uncovers a lot of great ghoul trivia; he’s especially good on Gilles de Rais, a mystic/ satanist/ nobleman/ warrior-comrade with Joan C’Arc who mass-slaughtered/ tortured literally thousands of little boys and girls, often slitting them in two while they hung by their thumbs and using one of their internal organs to bring himself to orgasm. He was especially fond of lungs, which enabled him to mucaloid their gasps for air.

When Gilles got bored with just screwing around he would use one of the carcasses tor a bathtub, washing in a mixture of their blood and his semen. For variation, he might sit in their slit bodies, excreting the night’s gluttony into their dying guts. Eventually the Inquisition raked him in, and after being threatened with weeks of torture, Gilles broke down and confessed his excursion into Hell in glorious, livid detail. When he’was through, he was, of course, convicted and hung, and as he walked to the gallows the parents of the children he had killed wept, because the confession had cleansed his black and rotting soul and now heaven was within his grasp. ’

WolFs book succeeds on the level of shee.r readabilitv: his critique of the films is personal and in-depth, as is his treatment of modern vampire literature like I Am Legend and The Dracula Archives, another commonly found fang book which is phonus balonus dross attempting to pass as fact merely because it tosses around Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess. And the tireless Wolf even finds a real live blood drinker,a guy named Alex from San Francisco (where else?) who started slurping the sticky warm red stuff when he tried to give his sixteen year old girlfriend a hicky. Since then things have been coasting along; he doesn’t look for “victims” — they come to him: aging “fags,” plump virginal schoolgirls, and daredeveil sickies. He just digs his incisors and eyeteeth into their throats, chests or groins. He’s as close to the edge as they can ever get, and they jes’ love it, Yum!

The best book of all is Mastfers’ The Natural History of the Vampire. This tome lumps in everybody: ghouls, necrophiles, vampires, sexual pervo mass murderers, cannibals, the Plague, bats, and buried alive undead, as well as the big-deal pervs like Gilles, Elizabeth Bathory (who would have made one bitch of a role for the middle-aged Bette Davis), De Sade, and lesser lights with obscurer grotesqueries, as well as all sorts of vampire legend/films/literature. That’s right, we’ve finally found an Encyclopedia of the Sick. (Great pics, too!) It touches every cranny, all the bases (or shall we say the debased?) except, ironically, the real Dracula, Vlad, who would have qualified on his own rep anyway.

It’s full of tales about weirdos from every walk of life sinking their choppers into their brethren, a misanthrope’s joke book. Thrill! as you read about Oedipal offspring slicing the thighs of virgin schoolgirls like Butterball turkeys and bringing them home to Momma for Sunday dinner. Pant! with the soldier who got his kicks ripping and shredding dead bodies, looking for a girl cadaver to stick his dingle in, and wasting the graveyard if he couldn’t find one. Gurgle! in empathy with the Monster of Dusseldorf who munched up 29 little girls and inspired Fritz Lang’s film classic M. Yes kids, it’s good stuff indeed; pick it up today, along with Muscle of Love and a fresh copy of “Tell Laura I Love Her.”

Kathy Miller

THE BLACK BOOK

by Middleton A. Harris, Morris

Levitt, Roger Furman & Ernest Smith

(Random House)

There is a short story writer named Isaac Bashevis Singer who writes these exquisite stories in Yiddish and has them translated into English, and everytime I read one I’m thankful that I’m not Jewish, because if I were, I’d want to have a grandfather like Isaac Bashevis Singer and the odds are I wouldn’t so if I can’t I don’t want to be and I’m glad. So I’m not Jewish, and I’m not black either, and this book is the one which similarly makes me glad I’m not black.

“Suppose,” says Bill Cosby in his introduction, “a three hundred year-old black man had decided, oh, say .when he was about ten, to keep a scrapbook — a record of what it was like for himself and his people in these United States. He would keep newspaper articles which interested him, old family photos, trading cards, advertisements, letters, handbills, dreambooks, and posters — all sorts of stuff.” That is about as close as you can come to a comprehensive description of The Black Book. The wonder is not only that it has been done so very well but that nobody ever thought of doing it like this before.

It is almost foolish to say that black history doesn’t get the attention it M should in schools — they showed me a picture of Ralph Bunche, another of Booker T. Washington, and that was it. wj But when you say it’s being neglected, |C do you have any idea what is being 6 neglected? I bet you don’t, and this ^ book will bear me out.

Black people were cowboys, panned for gold in Alaska, owned Slaves, invented the pencil sharpener, had a gigantic independent movie industry all through the thirties and forties, nearly caused the destruction of New York City during the Civil War draft riots, and introduced sericulture (silk production) to the U.S. They were also slaves for a couple hundred years, and that is something The Black Book doesn’t let you forget. The book’s approach is a whole lot more effective than a tirade on slavery, though — it merely presents the facts as culled from contemporary accounts in newspapers, letters, and oral reminiscenses. There is a photograph of a scene where a Negro has been spitted and burnt alive, and a bunch of whites stand around the still-blowing coals. Their faces tell a lot. There is one hilarious letter from a freed slave living in Dayton to his former master, in which he agrees to return if a couple of small points can be cleared up. They aren’t all that small, of course and by the end of the letter, I was grinning. Old Massa musta flipped when he got that in the mail.

Yeah, there isn’t any preaching in The Black Book. Just the naked facts.

It’s not an anti-white screed at all — it’s a pro-black presentation. Pieces of things Black people have left behind on their way to where they are — stories of gris-gris, Marie Laveau the sorceress of New Orleans, stories of slave uprisings, of uprisings on shipboard by men unwilling to be slaves, of slaves who tricked their way to freedom, and of free black men reduced to virtual slavery after the Civil War by chilling Black Laws. With the amount of stuff around, there is no need at all to preach.

Add to this the incredibly tasteful job the compilers (editors? designers?) have done in arranging this material by loose subject matter, with a stunning graphic presentation that extends right down to the kind of paper they chose (brownish tinted) and the neat, almost antique typeface; add to this the fact that between these paper covers is at least in introduction to every possible facet of black life from numbers-playing to the Underground Railroad to coon songs to the survival of African religion, and you have a blockbuster of a book for $5.95.

If your’re black and don’t have The Black Book, you should. If you’re white, you should have it too. Or Chinese, or Martian. But most especially if you’re American. ^ Ed Ward