somethingsupwithdrac

[somethingsupwithdrac]

22 July

Aaand we’re back to the Demeter, where everything is fine and nothing else will go wrong. They got through three days of rough weather, the crew are over whatever it is that frightened them, and the first mate has stopped being an ass. This is definitely a situation that will not change and the voyage will be literally smooth sailing from here on, I’m sure.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

Dracula Daily, July 20

[somethingsupwithdrac]

20 July

Renfield seems to have gotten over that refusal, because he appears to have started his whole experiment over and begun catching flies again, and the birds are nowhere to be found. Well, except for the mass of feathers that he vomited up, according to the attendant looking after him. (This is legitimately one of the grossest images in the entire book to me. Just...horking up a ball of soggy feathers. Gross. I am trying very hard not to think about what would happen if he ate or tried to eat a cat alive in the same manner.)

Not a huge fan of the drugging and snooping bit here, to say the least. Jack’s nosing around at least confirms that he’s correct in his deductions about what Renfield is up to with the collecting and consuming of larger and larger animals. I will give him a smidgen of credit for the fact that, despite the temptation to, again, give in and see where it ends up, he still decides not to go surfing down that slippery slope. Sure, there’s a possibility of some great scientific breakthrough, but also: very unethical behaviour that he recognizes as such and backs away from, again. Certain other Victorian horror novel characters could learn a bit of restraint from him, Victor.

And then we end on him reflecting on his own life and his sadness that it hasn’t worked out as he hoped, but also his dedication to finding something else that will make him as happy as Renfield is with his weird life-absorbing experimentations. I. I’m not sure that any of that qualifies as “okay”, but you do you, Jack.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

Whoops, behind again.

19 July

Hey, it’s Seward and Renfield again! Renfield’s spiders and flies are almost gone now, and he has a whole flock of sparrows, and now he he wants a kitten, which I’m sure would end well. Jack, showing that he’s thought about this enough to have a good idea of where this is headed and realize that he could say yes, but acquiescing to that request could be the starting point for surfing headfirst down a slippery slope of very unethical experimentation, says “NOPE”. Renfield is predictably unhappy about this, as it disrupts his own experimentations, and we end the day with him trying one last time to convince Seward to let him have a cat, and Jack still refusing. Sorry bud, guess you’ll just have to eat those birds yourself.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

18 July

Dracula Daily is back and veering hard into found footage horror movie territory, this time on a boat. Everything starts out quite unremarkably, and then, of course, things start to go wrong. The crew begin to get fearful and “dissatisfied” about something, then quietly upset but refusing to elaborate on what has them so unsettled.

Then one of them disappears, and the remaining crew seem subdued but unsurprised, because, according to them, there is “something” nefarious on board. (Gee, who/what could that be? We’re back to the characters in Dracula not knowing they’re in Dracula, and it’s great.)

Oh, what’s this? One of the crew says he saw a weird guy lurking around the ship, so of course the Captain decides they should go looking around the ship, because there’s only so many places someone can hide. Better not check all of those conveniently human-sized boxes, though, there’s no way someone would be hiding in one of those. (Through all of this the first mate continues to be an unhelpful dick and I vote for him to mysteriously disappear next.)

I’m sure everything will be fine and that’s the last bit of trouble the crew is going to have on this voyage.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

7 July

Wow, I am actually days behind on Poe Daily, so I will just say that I have always liked Hop-Frog for that deeply satisfying ending. It’s very oof on the whole to modern eyes, but it’s such a good revenge story in the end.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

Broke: Eat the rich.

Woke: Trick the rich into dressing up as ourang-outangs in highly flammable costumes, chain them together, hang them from the chandelier hook, and light them on fire before you escape through the sky-light!

[somethingsupwithdrac]

1 July

Oh, okay then, we’re just gonna leave Jonnyboy on a literal cliffhanger. This is fine. (I knew this was coming but it hits different when you’re reading in real time.)

Back to Renfield and Seward, then, whee. Renfield is up in the asylum being an early adopter of insect-based protein in Europe while Jack gets all weirded out about it. Maybe you shouldn’t be so nosy, Jack. ALSO, the sheer, unbridled hilarity of Jack talking about Renfield’s diary keeping when Mr. Only Nine-And-Twenty Asylum Keeper Guy is sitting in his office recording every word of this out loud on a phonograph like the world’s saddest podcaster.

Glass houses, Jack. Glass houses.

(Ed. to add a thing: I know he’s not complaining here, it’s just absolutely hilarious to me that Seward’s over here like “wow look at those pages and pages of mysterious numbers” while being an even bigger nerd with his audio diary.)

[somethingsupwithdrac]

30 June

Jonathan is still alive, making what might be his last entry, and readying himself to face whatever is coming. It’s daytime, and there’s something in the air that makes him feel safe and gives him the courage to make a move to escape, so he races to the door, which last he saw had been unlocked. He draws back the chains and bolts, and. nothing. Dracula, of course, locked it again at some point in the night, and Jonathan is still trapped.

It’s right here that Jon decides fuck it, he’s going to get that key and he’s going to try to escape even if he dies in the attempt. Being killed now for the audacity of trying to get out is a better fate than whatever the hell else Dracula is planning for him. To that end, he wastes no time in going out the window and down into Dracula’s room once again, because Jonathan Harker is a man with no fucks left to give and nothing left to lose.

It takes no time at all for him to get back down into the chapel, but once there, Jon is presented with yet another new horror in this ongoing trauma conga line: Dracula, body refreshed and looking decades younger, having obviously recently fed, and fed well. Jonathan pushes past his own horror to search for the key, and, not finding it, stops and looks at Dracula, who is smiling at him. The Count knows he’s there. He knew he was there the first time Jonathan ventured into his resting place, and when Jonathan grabs a shovel to try to kill him, he uses his mesmeric power to paralyze Jonathan and cause the shovel to twist in his hands and only strike Dracula’s forehead, leaving the Count bleeding, grinning horribly at Jonathan as the coffin lid closes over him again.

He retreats back up the passageway to the Count’s room, trying to figure out his next move, listening to the sounds of Dracula’s servants bringing in carts, tramping through some other passage into the vault to retrieve the Count and his many boxes of earth, and other assorted sounds that signal his imminent doom. Trying to escape back down through the vault fails-someone locks it up tight from the other side, quite audibly, right in front of him-and Jonathan is left trapped again, alone in the castle as Dracula and his entourage go on their merry way.

And then Jon decides that he’s absolutely done with all of this, he’s not staying here, so he pockets some of Dracula’s gold and climbs out the window to begin scaling his way down the castle wall, figuring that if he dies, at least he’ll die as a man and not a monster. What a madlad. 

[somethingsupwithdrac]

SO excited for everyone to read tomorrows entry of Dracula Daily :)

[somethingsupwithdrac]

29 June

Things continue to suck for Jonathan, but he’s getting beyond the fear and despair into anger and wishing for a gun to shoot this asshole Count.

Who is continuing to gleefully fuck with Jon, of course, and upon Jonathan asking why he can’t leave tonight rather than tomorrow, pulls yet another move to show what absolute control he has over the situation. You want to leave, Jonathan, of course you can go, I’d never keep you against your will. Shame about all those wolves howling right outside the door tho. It’s a very intentionally cruel and manipulative thing to do, just to try to break Jonathan a little more, and of course it works. Jonathan returns to his room in despair, and just as one last fuck you to him, Dracula blows him a goddamn kiss before shutting him in again, and then to add one more insult on top of that, he hears Dracula telling the Sisters that they can have Jonathan tomorrow, and they all laugh at his anger.

Where’s a whole forest of wooden stakes and axes when you need them?

[somethingsupwithdrac]

I love that the theme of Poe’s stories is generally just A Guy Goes Through Some Wild-Ass Shit.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

Poe Daily has updated!

I didn't set out to do the 3 main sailor stories in the first two months, but they do have kind of a summer beach vibe.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

 25 June

Things are still not okay, but my good friend Jonathan seems to have reached a point where he’s been so overloaded by fear and despair that he’s just kind of burnt all of that out and passed through the other side to a sort of calm determination. A calm determination that leads him to climb out a window hundreds of meters above a cliff and down a sheer stone wall. The realization that he has nothing left to lose by trying except his life, and that dying this way, as a man, is far from the worst fate he could have and is better than dying like an animal slaughtered by Dracula. At least if he dies this way he still keeps the thing that makes him him and has a chance at the afterlife. Determined to at least try to find a way out, he writes goodbyes to both his dear Mina and his friend/mentor just in case he fails, even though he knows that they’ll never see them.

Oh, Jonathan.

Later in the day, Jonathan is back! He’s done some exploring and found some things! He managed to climb down using the spaces between stones where mortar had worn away as hand- and footholds, which, as someone with a fear of heights, makes me anxious just to read about. Climbing down to the Count’s window is a risky move, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and there are fewer more desperate times than this one. Luckily the Count isn’t there, but a large pile of assorted currency is.

“gold of all kinds, Roman, and British, and Austrian, and Hungarian, and Greek and Turkish money, covered with a film of dust, as though it had lain long in the ground. None of it that I noticed was less than three hundred years old. “ 

This really drives home just how old Dracula is: clearly he’s been around long enough to amass coins from all of these empires from multiple centuries and parts of Europe. Everything else in the room is also obviously quite aged and tarnished or dirty, as though it’s been sitting around for, again, multiple centuries.

He manages to find an open door, and a passage downward, and finds himself in an old chapel which has been used as a burial chamber, where, amongst all of the other old coffins and vaults, lie the many boxes of earth delivered earlier. In one of those, to Jonathan’s shock and horror, lies the Count, still as death, open-eyed, apparently in some kind of sleeping state  and clearly having only recently laid down there. Jonathan flees from this terrible sight and rushes back to his room the same way he came to try to think about all of this.

I have to say that IDK if I would be holding it together nearly as well as he is here. The poor man already has clear evidence that the Count is absolutely not human, and now he finds Dracula just chilling in a box full of dirt in a crypt, sleeping with his eyes open and definitely exhibiting signs of some kind of undead state, and still he has the courage to go back to his room and continue attempting to plan instead of just giving up. This is some progress, at least! Not sure it does much good, but this is at least new information to add to his planning.

[somethingsupwithdrac]

People calling Jonathan an asshole for thinking that woman was better off dead and not picking up on the absolute horror and tragedy of that line is probably one of the most frustrating things that has happened in dd so far omg

[somethingsupwithdrac]

24 June

There’s a new message from my good friend Jonathan and tbh I have no mental energy right now to do a funny recap. Jon’s still trapped with no way out, Dracula is still Dracula-ing around, and some poor lady whose baby he kidnapped and fed to the Sisters shows up looking for her child and then gets fucking eaten by wolves while Jonathan watches and can do absolutely nothing about it but sit down and cry.

Weird how familiar that helplessness feels right now. 

[somethingsupwithdrac]

 22 June

I am so behind on Poe Daily, whoops. Just gonna do all of M. Valdemar at once, I guess.

I like the presentation of this one as a factual report on an actual occurrence, with the narrator opening things with a statement of his desire to present the facts succinctly, as he recalls them, in order to prevent any further misrepresentation. We wouldn’t want anyone getting things wrong about this totally true event that definitely happened.

Our narrator for this one is into mesmerism, which was definitely a whole Thing at the time this was written, and says that although there have been many experiments done, for some reason nobody has ever tried to hypnotize someone at the moment of their death. Yeah, narrator, can’t imagine why that might be. What a strange and inexplicable oversight!

Narrator, of course, decides to rectify this situation, as one does, in order to satisfy his curiosity about whether it would even work and if so how long one might suspend animation in a state of undeath. For his subject, he chooses his friend, monsieur Ernest Valdemar, a totally real guy whose name we all know and who wrote totally real books that we have definitely read. The description of his appearance is absolute gold, honestly. White facial hair and a head full of hair so black it looks fake and lower limbs resembling those of a man who also had tuberculosis and spent his whole life in ill health is certainly a look.

Narrator has previously successfully mesmerized him, for a given value of “successfully”. The “putting him to sleep via hypnosis” part worked, apparently, but the part where Narrator actually managed to control him in this state, not so much. He chalks that up to Valdemar’s illness, which, fair I guess? I don’t know how mesmerism works, maybe having your lungs ravaged by bacteria does make it more difficult. He’s surprisingly excited by Narrator’s proposal to use him as the subject of this latest experiment, in contrast to his attitude toward previous mesmeric endeavors, and agrees to send for Narrator about a day before the calculated time of his death. (He is surprisingly calm about this whole thing, which I suppose makes sense for a long term illness that you know isn’t going to end any other way.)

Narrator then tells us that about seven months ago he got the note that said ‘get over here, I’m on my way out, let’s do this thing.’ and went on over to get on with the experimenting. Valdemar already looks quite corpselike, and we get a great and surprisingly graphic and gruesome description of his condition. It’s all ossified lung tissue and tubercules and makes me eternally grateful for modern medicine. (Also, I see you being punny here with that repeated use of “dissolution”, Eddie. lmao) So Valdemar and the narrator have one more discussion about this whole thing and then the next night, as he’s dying and under the watchful eye of Valdemar’s docs, the mesmerization happens.

Narrator does his thing around eight and then continues at around ten, not much having seemed to happen in the interim, and about fifteen minutes after that, Valdemar slips into what is apparently a “perfect” mesmeric state. Narrator is, finally, able to exercise full control of Valdemar’s body in this state. Hey, good for him, look at our guy finally reaching the true height of his abilities! When he and the doctors and nurses who had been caring for Valdemar check in on him the next day he’s in exactly the same state, and Narrator finds that he has more complete control over Valdemar’s limbs than he’d had over any other subject.

And then he starts doing the “hey! are you sleeping? HEY, ARE YOU SLEEPING?” thing and Valdemar manages to answer with a sort of “Yes, ffs, I’m dying, leave me alone and let me die without pain”. The doctors agree that yeah, the man’s dying, we should all just stop bothering him and let it happen. He does, more or less, and the the real spooky shit starts to happen.

All the life obviously drains out of him, and his appearance becomes even more ghastly and horrifying than before, obviously dead, and yet he’s somehow still speaking. His voice has become terrible and hollow and sounds like it’s coming form somewhere far away, and he says that he has been sleeping and is now dead. Creepy! The med student in attendance faints dead away, which tbh is a pretty understandable reaction. Medical school prepares you for a lot of things, but talking corpses is not one of them as far as I’m aware.  Narrator and co then leave Valdemar with a fresh set of nurses to watch over him and check in on him the next day to find him in the same state of undeath they had left him in.

It's now, the narrator says, at the time of writing this report, seven months on from that day, and Valdemar remains in that mesmerized state of undeath. That...seems a little unethical to me, but what do I know, I’m not a 19th century mesmerist. He and the doctors involved in this probably extremely questionable experiment have decided that it’s gone on long enough and it’s time to try to wake Valdemar up, because there’s no way that’s going to go horribly awry. 

LOL at this: “ it is the (perhaps) unfortunate result of this latter experiment which has given rise to so much discussion in private circles” “Perhaps” unfortunate, narrator? Perhaps? Really? This is only a maybe to you? Also “ so much of what I cannot help thinking unwarranted popular feeling.” I dunno, man, I feel like it’s pretty warranted.

He starts to wake Valdemar up, and the first sign that something might be very slightly amiss is the ichor dripping from his eyes. (Sidenote, ichor is an excellent word that isn’t used nearly often enough.) He tries and fails to make Valdemar move his arm, and then asks Valdemar what he wants, to which Valdemar responds, more or less “I don’t care, just do something, I’m dead!” It was maybe not the best idea to leave him as he was for seven months, I’m thinking. Narrator of course decides to continue with waking him up, which ends...badly, to say the least. He thinks he’s about to succeed, and everyone else in the room also apparently believes he will as well, and then, uh, this happens:

“As I rapidly made the mesmeric passes, amid ejaculations of “dead! dead!” absolutely bursting from the tongue and not from the lips of the sufferer, his whole frame at once—within the space of a single minute, or even less, shrunk—crumbled—absolutely rotted away beneath my hands. Upon the bed, before that whole company, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putrescence.”

Whoops. Guess they left ol’ Valdemar out a little too long, huh? That ‘speedy dissolution’ thing proved true in the end, though maybe not quite in the same sense that our guys meant it. I joke, but tbh the image of a body instantly rotting away into a puddle of sludge is honestly quite effectively horrifying, especially if you look at the whole thing from someone who was taken in by this and thought it was real.