Bram Stoker

The Lair of the White Worm illustrated Bram Stoker

The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and most of what has been written has been shrouded in some embarrassment. Maud Ellmann, however, in her 'Introduction' to the 1996 Oxford World's Classics edition of Dracula, is unusually forthright: she describes it as a 'startlingly demented novel', and adds: Stoker was prude and pornographer at once, each of these impulses apparently exacerbated by the fury of the other. The conflict reached fever-pitch in The Lair of the White Worm, in which the beautiful Lady Arabella is revealed to be a huge white worm living in a noxious orifice beneath her house: a 'round fissure seemingly leading down into the very bowels of the earth', seething with slime, and stinking of 'the draining of war hospitals, of slaughter-houses, the refuse of dissecting rooms ... the sourness of chemical waste and poisonous effluvium of the bilge of a water-logged ship whereon a multitude of rats had been drowned'. Here Stoker's obsessional imagination, skilfully controlled in Dracula, overflows all bound