Bram Stoker despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula has remained an enigma David J Skal in a psychological & cultural portrait exhumes the inner world & strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon Stoker was inexplicably paralysed as a boy & his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries & horrors fever opium abuse bloodletting quack cures & the obsession with "bad blood" that inform every page of Dracula Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde who emerges as Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic novel The psychosexual
Dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with Walt Whitman his punishing work ethic & his adoration of the actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail