In a footnote to my section on invasions, I described Dracula’s campaign of conquest in Stoker’s 1897 novel as ‘a one-man invasion’. I was already interested in alternate history science fiction, and recognised in these mostly-fotgotten stories the precursors of the many 20th Century stories which imagine an alternative outcome to the Second World War featuring a Nazi occupation of Britain (Len Deighton’s SS/GB, Kevin Brownlow’s film It Happened Here). For the thesis, I read up on invasion narratives (George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, Wells’s The War in the Air, Saki’s When William Came), which imagine England overwhelmed by its enemies (usually the Germans).
At University in 1978, I took a course entitled Late Victorian Revolt, tought by the poet Laurence Lerner and Norman Mackenzie (Wells’s biographer), for which I wrote a thesis (‘The Secular Apocalypse: The End of the World in Turn of the Century Fictions’) which later cropped up as the work of the main character of my novel third novel, Jago. I regarded this as a personal vindication. When I happened to return in 1989 to the building that had been Dr Morgan’s assembly hall, the stage was set for that year’s school play, Dracula. I had the Aurora glow-in-the-dark hobby kit (‘Frightning Lightning Strikes!’) of Lugosi as the Count, and began to collect other novels (far fewer then than there are now) which sequelised, imitated, parodied or ripped off the character. Shortly afterwards, I read (and reread) Bram Stoker’s novel, and went out of my way to catch as many Dracula movies as possible. Mercifully, this juvenilia has been lost. I think my parents expected the craze to wear off, but obviously it never did.Īmong my first attempts at writing was a one-page play, based on the Lugosi film, which I wrote, starred in, and directed in drama class at Dr Morgan’s Grammar School in Autumn, 1970. I was captivated by Dracula, and became an obsessive in the way only an eleven-year-old can be obsessive. I can’t overestimate the effect this has had on the subsequent course of my life, since the film was the spark which lit the flames of my interests in horror and in cinema. When I was eleven years old, my parents let me stay up past my bed-time to watch the 1930 Tod Browning version of Dracula, with Bela Lugosi, on television.
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