Fetch

It’s okay, Morrigan, it’s not how you end, but how you go there that counts. 

In unrelated news, I’ve become obsessed with vampires lately. I’ve always been a bit of a folklore nut, but I never paid much attention to the variety of legends about vampires found throughout the world. My initial inspiration comes from binging What We Do In The Shadows on Hulu, which in turn inspired a very vivid dream that I am now developing into a short story, possibly a series or a novel. What We Do is really great at mining the folklore for comedy, and strikes a good balance between the mundane pace of reality TV (the conceit of the show) and the supernatural. So I’ve done some light digging (aka read Wikipedia) and started a reading list; and to make up for a strange deficit in my reading history, I started on Bram Stoker’s Dracula last night.

Why haven’t I read Dracula before? I think I was about 5 or 6 when I came across a copy on my mom’s book shelf. It was thick and too big for my developing reading skills at the time, of course; but I think my brain filed it away as “too big to read”, an impression that lasted long after I had become a reader of giant Russian novels, James Joyce, and other giant tomes as an adult. Popular culture also reinforced the “I know this already” assumption with a million Dracula movies and parodies. Then this weekend I took in the Moffat-Gattis Dracula series on Netflix, and realized there was a lot I didn’t really know. The series is a lot of fun, btw, if you’re looking recommendations: the acting is great, the mood is eerie and chilling, and there is some genuinely scary stuff; and, yeah, it suffers from Moffat’s sensationalism and too-clever-by-half twists, but it’s enjoyable in spite of that.