The Lair of the White Worm

You might like this book if you believe in the intrinsic superiority of the white peoples over other races, particularly black folks. Since I really don't feel that way I found myself getting more and more irate until the "savage", intrinsically "primitive" "nigger" got killed off whilst attempting murder. One might of course, think that this was the view of the other characters only and it should not be infered that Stoker believed it. Unfortunately, Oolanga is a "nigger" to the narrator, too anf that narrator is not a character and so we must assume that it is Stoker's opinion.

Now with the black guy out of the way, you might think that the offensive attitudes might also go away but that would be to ignore the outrageous sexism and show more with three major female characters, none of whom die early on, one has to suffer that right to the end. Frankly, I can't explain the masochism that made me finish this book; it was pure self torture.

The sexism is for the most part somewhat more subtle than the racism; the heroine is allowed some strength of will, bravery and independence of mind - until she gets married, at which point she immediately requires her husband's opinion on everything and defers to his view as obviously superior - because he's her husband. Even her strength of will and bravery are nothing compared to his - because he's male, of course. Are you vomiting yet? Again, is this Stoker's view? Well, a male character, an older man who is meant to be a wise, ,knowledgable character, the font of wisdom for the younger protagonists and the reader finds that the Suffragettes, "want principle". Funny, I thought they were fighting for a principle!

One might argue that one should set all this aside, because it was the attitude of the time and instead look at the literary merits of the book when judging it. One would be wrong, however: the times - they were a changing. The Suffragette movement had started. Thomas Hardy had been fighting the cause of women for decades: this was a time for choosing sides. Stoker chose the repugnant side.

So maybe you are a scary person and don't find all this offensive, or maybe you are particularly good at compartmentalising the foulness from the plot and writing. If so you really still aren't in for a treat, or even a mediocre good time. No, you are in for a waste of effort.

The set up might sound familiar; a youngish, dynamic man with an older mentor, full of obscure wisdom and knowledge. Two attractive young women in danger. An ancient evil. (In this case a hilarious one, completely empty of power to horrify or instill terror.) The protagonists more or less don't do anything for an age, then the monster attacks them - there's a scene with a carriage being chased - then some completely baffling actions by the monster. Then a denouement that has been predictable for an age.

The only thing I really liked about Dracula was the powerful sense of dread in the opening section written from Transylvania. Nowhere in this book is there anything even remotely as affecting. What a heap of rubbish! show less

Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm was his final novel, first published in 1911 one year prior to his death. He based the story upon the legend of the Lambton Worm from County Durham in North East England. In the original legend, John Lambton, heir to the Lambton Estate, battles a giant worm (from “wyrm,” meaning dragon) that terrorized local villages.

In Stoker’s novel, an Australian named Adam Salton travels to Derbyshire where his uncle wishes to make him his heir. At a neighboring estate, Edgar Caswall makes mesmeric assault upon a local girl, Lilla Watford, while Arabella March works to enchant Caswall. Salton, finding a great many black snakes on the property, hires a mongoose to hunt them. When it attacks Arabella, show more she shoots it to death, later tearing a second mongoose apart with her bare hands. Adam and Sir Nathaniel de Salis, a friend of his uncle, make plans to stop Arabella, with Salis taking on a Van Helsing role. In the end, Adam, Mimi, and Salis use dynamite to destroy the White Worm and the house that contains it.

Stoker’s novel is steeped in class conflict, with various figures threatening the established order through their intentions to move between classes. Adam, as an Australian on his way to becoming a lord, is a novelty. Stoker portrays Arabella’s intentions on Edgar, however, as both a threat to the class structure and to gender roles, as she aggressively pursues Edgar beyond the expectations for women of the time. An African servant named Oolanga, however, makes this novel decidedly racist in addition to its classist commentary. Stoker writes Oolanga’s dialogue in dialect, portraying him as more animal than man, with his greatest threat being his dream to marry Arabella and make her love him. When she kills him, Stoker focuses the reader’s attention not to the brutal murder of a man, but on how coldly Arabella killed him.

In the introduction to this edition of the novel, the Pulp Fictions series editor writes, “No apologies are offered for delighting again in these tales of wonder and fantastic adventure. Please put you critical faculties in neutral and bask in the pure pulp escapism that these tales evoke” (pg. i). That, however, is quite impossible once one reads the sections with Oolanga. Adding further issues, this edition reprints the abridged 28-chapter 1925 version of Stoker’s novel rather than the original 40-chapter novel. While of interest to those studying late Victoriana or the fiction of the Edwardian era, it will likely not entertain casual readers as much as Stoker’s more famous Dracuala. The reader is instead directed to Ken Russell’s 1988 film loosely based on this novel, as it cuts the racism in favor of a more bizarre snake-god-cum-vampire tale that will better entertain in its strangeness. show less

Micsoda cím! A fehér féreg fészke! Hármas alliteráció - Babits biztos beájulna! -, az ember csak meghallja, és kúszik fel a hátán a jeges borzongás. Kár, hogy maga a könyv csak egy vontatott viktoriánus horrorsztori hímsovinizmussal és rasszizmussal meghintve, ami a feszültségteremtés csimborasszójának azt tartja, hogy a szereplők hosszadalmasan elkezdik fejtegetni, éppen mi is történik, és amikor végre kezd izgalmas lenni, kijelentik, hogy késő van, tegyük el magunkat holnapra, majd reggeli után folytatjuk.

Ügyeletes jófiúnk, Adam Salton Ausztráliából Angliába teszi át székhelyét, mert talál magának egy nagybácsit, aki rá akarja hagyni a vagyonát. Ez a nagybácsi (idősebb Salton) show more gyakorlatilag egy háztartásban él bizonyos Sir Nathaniellel, és mindketten iszonyatosan kedvesek Adammal, aki pedig (mivel jófiú) maga is visszakedveskedi őket. Egy jobb életben (és még rosszabb regényben) ők innentől harmóniában élhetnének hármasban, mint egy jól működő nem hagyományos család, de erre nincs mód, mert vannak ugye szomszédok is a világon. Az egyik a fiatal Caswall afrikai szolgájával (aki ronda és gonosz, mint az öregördög, és súlyosbító körülményként sámán is), a másik pedig Lady Arabella, a kígyóasszony, akik elkezdik jól megvuduzni környezetüket, mindenféle okkult hátborzongást idézve ezzel elő. No most a Brit Nemesség Ősi Almanachjában feketén-fehéren le van írva, hogy vuduzni majdnem akkora modortalanság egy arisztokratától, mint leszavazni a Munkáspártra, szóval a fenn említett triász beveti magát – pláne mert Caswall vuduzásának célpontjai között vannak csinos hölgyek is, és ez felébreszti Adamban az óvó hímtigrist. És közben, az éj leple alatt, az erdő avarjában, ott tekereg a hattyúfehér rettenet.

Tényleg cuki könyvként regisztrálnám, ha nem idegesítene az a nagyvonalúság, ahogy Stoker a logikát kezeli. Mondok egy példát: Lady Arabella, aki már párszor meg akarta ölni hőseinket, meghívja őket teázni. Erre minden normális ember azt mondaná, hogy „Teázni? Elmész te a búsba, hát hülye vagyok én?” De Sir Nathaniel nem ilyen földhözragadt, ő kijelenti, hogy igenis el kell fogadni a meghívást, mert – figyeljétek az okfejtést! - a csatában az győz, aki megválasztja a csatateret, és azzal, hogy elfogadják a Lady Arabella kastélyát helyszínnek, azt sajátjukévá teszik, így máris olyan, mintha ők választottak volna csatateret. Szun Ce, hallod ezt? És te, Clausewitz? Stratégia mesterfokon! Stoker amúgy is kiváltképp zavaros jelenetekkel dolgozik, a szereplők viselkedése pedig időnként a „szürreális” jelző használatára jogosít, érthetetlen cselekedeteikkel nem csak a saját dolgukat nehezítik meg, hanem az olvasóét is. Antagonistáink közül Lady Arabella úgy-ahogy elmegy, de Caswall csak kisbaltával lett tessék-lássék módon kifaragva, a „jók” meg olyan émelyítőek, mint egy nutellával megkent, lépesmézzel töltött mályvacukor. Mindent összevetve egy kis irodalmi kalandozásra jó a kötet, legalább látjuk, Stoker nem csak a Drakulát írta, hanem mást is. Csak egy pöttyet elszállt a feje fölött az idő vasfoga.

Ui.: Ja, az tuti, hogy aki a hátsó borítón összefoglalta a cselekményt, az nem olvasta a könyvet. Talán inkább a könyvből készült filmből informálódott. show less

I would give negative five stars to this book if that were possible. This is the worst book I have read in my entire life. I mean, I'm pretty fond of Dracula, although it has its problems, but ... my god. This is really bad.

The writing is terrible--a combination, I suppose, of Stoker being really bad at third-person omniscient POV (Dracula is epistolary and wonderfully paced) and not bothering to edit *at all.* (He worked on Dracula for years--the only one of his books that he took such care with.) This novel is about The End of the World and The Struggle Between Good and Evil and Antediluvian Monsters and things like that--but Stoker almost completely fails to convey any sense of suspense whatsoever. His prose is plodding and awkward. show more His plot is more holes than anything else. His characters are either racist or misogynist stereotypes or completely unsympathetic.

Speaking of racist--this book is also the most racist novel I have ever read, and I've read some pretty racist nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century novels. Even after learning about the worst aspects of American slavery, I was disturbed by the casual racist vitriol in this book. It reads as though Stoker invented the West African character Oolanga simply to have a focal point for all his pent-up hatred and fear.

If you've read Dracula, you can probably guess at the basics of the misogyny in this book--especially after I tell you that the White Worm is actually the alternate form of a (sexy) human woman.

On top of all this it's extra frustrating that Stoker's great imagination is still in evidence in this heap of crap. There are some really evocative images--a huge falcon-shaped kite frightening away immense flocks of birds, hypnotic staring matches between the characters, lightning-triggered explosions, and the White Worm itself--that could form the skeleton of a really fascinating story. It would make a great graphic novel, after the whole thing had been soaked in Draino for about five years. show less

This falls under “There may have been promise in pockets, but otherwise not a good book.” I read this on the app Serial Reader, which breaks up works of classic literature into chunks that can be read in about 10 to 15 minutes each. This format worked well, actually, and helped create some suspense. But the story didn’t end up being that successful.

The overriding impression I had was that this story felt like an abridgement. We never really got details about where the White Worm came from and the reasons behind its terrorizing this particular bit of countryside. The story felt rushed, and some characters felt unnecessary and underdeveloped, such as Adam’s uncle, who spends the whole time having the White Worm hidden from him, show more and Oolanga, who seems to have been included primarily for the other characters to be racist about.

I wouldn’t recommend this for recreational reading — perhaps if you’re studying the evolution of the horror novel and can discuss its contents and context with someone. Otherwise, don’t bother. show less

I can’t remember why I had this sitting around on my ereader (apart from it being public domain and therefore free). I think it might be because it was supposedly an influence in Stephen King’s short story “Jersualem’s Lot” in Night Shift, which I quite liked, but since then I’ve read Stoker’s Dracula and really didn’t like it. Compared to The Lair of the White Worm, though, Dracula is a beautiful masterpiece. This is a really, really, really bad book. Even amongst Gothic scholars, Stoker’s die-hard fans and general lovers of old-timey English horror literature, The Lair of the White Worm is a rambling and nonsensical novel.

The plot, such as it is, involves young colonial lad Adam Shaw returning to the motherland at show more the invitation of his great-uncle, who wishes to pass on his Staffordshire mansion to him. But it turns out one of their neighbours is an ancient and monstrous wyrm-like creature in human guise, so they take it upon themselves to destroy her. There are also weird psychic battles between unrelated characters, a horrifically racist caricature of an African voodoo priest, and a gigantic kite which controls birds or something? I gave up trying to follow the plot after about forty pages. Oh, and despite being set in 1860, the climax involves copious amounts of dynamite, which wasn’t invented until 1867.

It explained a lot when I found out The Lair of the White Worm was written after Stoker had a a number of strokes in the midst of tertiary syphilis, and he died not long after finishing it. Apparently the original version had forty chapters; I appear to have read the edited 1925 version which removed almost a hundred pages, and thank God for that. I can’t imagine the malarkey that would have gone on in those extra chapters. The Lair of the White Worm is an outright bad novel, and was only published because it was written by an extremely popular author and would have sold no matter what its pages contained.

(And what the hell’s going on with that cover? Why does the Worm have arms?) show less

Well. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. The white worm is not particularly scary, in my opinion, which is not usually a big deal. But when I add in the unnecessary, cruel, overt, baffling racism. And I mean "unnecessary" because the story line added NOTHING. It all just sort of fell apart for me. I kept reading because the writing wasn't awful and I wanted to know how in the world the author would end this thing.

NOT recommended.