Review/Miscellaneous Musings: The Dracula Dossier - Dracula Unredacted (System-neutral/GUMSHOE)
This
massive hardcover clocks in at 476 pages (489 in pdf form, with cover etc. being
counted among the pages), so let's take a look!
This book
was moved up in my review-queue due to me receiving a print copy in exchange
for a fair and unbiased review.
In a
nut-shell, this is a twist of the original Dracula-novel as penned by Bram
Stoker, with annotations. "I don't need to read that, I know Dracula's
story already!" - I can see this impulse in at least some readers out
there. You'd be wrong, for the text actually has been expanded by roughly 1/5 -
1/4 of its size, with characters like Kate Reed introduced to the fray,
providing additional depth and perspectives. This only in the beginning to keep
you reading - this is not vanilla-Dracula: The premise is that the unredacted
Dracula is an after-action field report that has been censored and changed in
the published version. So, please, indulge me and follow me on a little
excursion - I guarantee that the following analysis may actually make you
reconsider.
Blood. It
is impossible to talk about Dracula without first going on a brief tangent pertaining this most
fascinating of bodily fluids. No other fluid alarms us to its extent - we are
hard-wired to instinctually consider red an attention-catching color because of
it: The blue or green blood of other species does not alarm us in the
slightest, but red blood...there is something primal in its look, smell and
taste and throughout recorded human history, blood has been a central component
of our mythology - it is the gradient of life and the currency of death itself
for our kind. We "spill blood" when we kill, the implication of
casual shedding of it conjuring up an excess, a transgression against the
"civilized" code of conduct we based our societies on. Perhaps most
famously in recent TV-history, Dexter the serial killer ultimately is what?
Bingo - a blood-spatter analyst, signifying his killer-nature - he reads, in
blood. He divines with it, though he does so at the altar of science.
Altar? Yes,
for at the same time, blood has always held more meaning - the sacral component
is prevalent to this date: While we may have, for the most part, abolished the
notion of offering blood to deities and spirits, sacrificial practices have
been an integral part of religions all around the globe and indeed, continues
to be. Before you shake your head and point towards your enlightened
Christianity or other religion, please consider symbolism like "partaking
in the blood of Christ" or similar practices: To paraphrase Sir James
Frazer: We have moved up in our level of abstraction, but the thematic core
remains; the original religion fades, but the icon remains and takes on a new
mantle and guise. The haruspex of our day and age is the blood-spatter analyst.
Where there
is the sacred, however, there also is the profane and nary a thing that exists
in our world has as significant a powerful symbolic charge as blood - we
associate its transgressive excess with connotations of evil, of the vile and
debauchery. There is spectacle in fascination in blood, the grimy lair of an
insane butcher that reverberates with the middle ages' social stigma of the
meat-processing professions. A sense of revulsion, in this day and age more
than ever, is associated with slaughter and death of animals - mainly due to
the spilling of blood - for do we not all bleed red?
Bleeding
red...it evokes an instinctual sympathetic response, triggering flight or the
notion to help in most human beings...and here we have yet another intriguing
component: This sympathetic response can obviously rise: For as long as there
was fiction of blood, there also was a connotation of the sexual inherent in
its appearance. From the bodily fluid of the female menstruation to the
child-birth, the connotations of a triumphant hunt or battle - in no other
symbolically charged part of our bodies has there ever been more of a blending,
more of a fusion of Eros and Thanatos than in the blood that courses through
our veins. Beyond the obvious requirement of blood flow for intercourse, the
red lipstick, rouge on the cheeks, the red, sweaty lips set against a dark
beard - all of these and infinitely more signify the passion of blood. We blush
due to it. Our blood pump, commonly known as heart, accelerates when we are
aroused. It does not require a fetish of blood drinking or any sort of kink to
appreciate the powerful imagery and functionality that is associated with
blood.
While the
history of the non-folklore-vampire is a relatively brief one, our mythologies
are stuffed to the brim with creatures feasting upon the blood of the mortals,
prolonging their life and that often in sexually charged ways, coupling a
thirst for blood with a thirst for a deviantly-coded sexuality free of the
fetters of concern and empathy: The excess of spilled blood collocated into
sexuality, blending the adrenaline-charged association of triumphantly dancing
on the verge of death with the ample linguistically implied associations with
La petite mort.
This is an
intriguing turn of phrase mind - you: It originally pointed towards not our
commonly used synonym for orgasm, but simply denoted a loss of consciousness
and control. Consciousness and control - two factors that we value as a
species, that we need to survive...and that, ultimately are NOT associated with
any of the nigh-indefinite connotations we have with blood when we take a look
at the above. Blood is excess, passion and ID running rampant - it is NOT
control.
Against
this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that there frankly is no tale in
horror as well-known; none that has been adapted in this staggering amount of
guises. The themes, ultimately remain - but they change. Oh, how do they
change. Ask any person on the street whether they know what "Dracula"
is and they'll know. Only...they don't. You see, we all have probably
encountered the count in one of his hundreds of incarnations in various media
and forms of art and when we haven't encountered him, we have encountered
mythology derived from the original tale of the bloodsucking vampire, charged
with eroticism. Take a look at any given array of vampire novels, from the
infamous Twilight-books to the Shadow Chronicles or similar works of fiction
and you'll find a plethora of narratives sporting a female (or male - this is
2016, after all!) heroine/hero who has to tame the dark and brooding vampire,
come to terms with the associations and implicit violence and thus, ultimately,
transcend death itself. It's basically a twist on the beauty and the
beast-narrative, a tale, literally as old as time.
This,
however, was not always so - the folkloristic origins of Dracula and many a
bloodsucking mythological creature often were that of...well. Corpses.
Decaying, foul corpses rising from the grave to kill their families. The sexual
connotation only has been a relatively recent invention, with the eponymous
novel Dracula by Bram Stoker being one of the first to exemplify just this. And
while we all know the plot of Dracula, supposedly, precious few of us actually do.
I mean...we all have heard about Van Helsing, Harker, Mina and the Count
himself, obviously. Perhaps we have since then, via one of the countless
vampire anime or adaptations heard about Renfield as a servant of Dracula and
nebulously picture a kind of vampiric Igor or dashing, subservient underling
who homoerotically serves his dominant master. We all know how Dracula and
vampires in general have to return to their coffins at dawn, how they are
destroyed by the purging rays of light unless they are
daywalker-dhampir-half-breeds...you know, one of the most prolific
angsty-teen-power-fantasies ever devised in the last generation? Well, if your
conceptions of Dracula contained any of these tropes, if you thought by
yourself "I don't need to read this, I know it already!" - then you'd
be wrong. All of the above is not necessarily so in Bram Stoker's original
novel. Come on, if you haven't read this one, then I did blow your mind there,
at least a little, right?
And see,
that is the point I wanted to make...or at least, it is the first point I
wanted to make. You see, nary an iconic figure has so thoroughly underwent the
transformative progress of popular culture like Dracula: We know Frankenstein's
Monster, Jekyll/Hyde, we have werewolf-lore galore and still, none of these
classic creatures of anthropomorphized IDs of the dark romanticism have had
quite this impact; much less changed to quite this extent. In Bram Stoker's
Dracula, there is, no kidding, a scene wherein the count walks the daylit
streets of London with a straw hat on his head. Let *that* sink in.
How did
this come to pass that we know so little about the Dracula we all ostensibly
know? Well, to point to the above - the icon remains. Dracula is a symbolic
vessel for our anxieties and agendas of a given day and age. When Bram Stoker's
original novel gave voice to Mina Harker as a capable, female protagonist whose
moral fiber outclassed that of their male brethren throughout most of the
novel, later interpretations of the material had different foci: While Mrs.
Harker, in the original, ultimately was re-absorbed into the norms and ideas of
mainstream society in a lackluster addendum written to appease moral guardians
or Stoker's own sensibilities, there can still be no doubt that she already
exemplifies a new breed of female character, one beholden neither to the ever
more normative feminist movement of her day and age, nor to the patriarchal
structures of established mainstream British society- the transgressive element
lies not simply in her actions, but also in her skill-set and when she
chillingly remarks Dracula as her approaching husband, she is performing two
subversions at the same time: On the one hand, this state, sprung from her
spoiling through Dracula's blood has explicit connotations with rape and the
breaking of one's spirit. In the context of Victorian and fin-de-siècle
England, this can be seen as a scathing, sympathy-inducing attack on the angel
in the house-ideal of the demure, passion-less woman. At the same time,
however, it is also an equalization - for one devotion is replaced with
another, with Dracula, according to previous observations, being obviously
highly sexualized in his coded depiction.
In later
adaptations of Dracula, a subtext of a less obvious nature suddenly sprang to
life - namely the matter of fact that he is also a nostalgic relic. A book
written in the fin-de-siècle-era obviously needs to contend and address a
changing of values and the fears associated with the new world order, the
anticipation of upheavals the like of which our species had heretofore never
chronicled. English society, at this point, was suffused with a slowly shaking
foundation - the 3 grand psychological malaises cast their shadow, as a mankind
devoted to science and reason has to come to terms with neither being the center
of the universe, nor a creator's chosen master creation, nor master of one's
own faculties.
The rise of
fascist ideology as an international phenomenon and the anxiety a devolution or
degeneration of mankind could bring can perhaps be quoted as one of the reasons
why Dracula's original at that time did not elicit the same manner of
controversy as The Island of Dr. Moreau. Dracula's theme, though, proved to be
the more stable one: For in the Count's nobility, in his origin deep within the
Carpathians, he pointed for his contemporary audience towards a literally
darker, but also nostalgic time, where science, something the characters in
Dracula constantly, obsessively use, was of no importance. Indeed, Dracula
requires a return to sacral rites of Catholicism of all religions (quite
scandalous in Britain) and folklore; the light of enlightenment metaphorically
and physically, can't seem to touch him. This association with ages past, with
"simpler" times is a universal human notion - it was then and still
is today. Dracula, in many a rendition in media, is a nostalgic atavism for us
as a society, but he is, at the same time the exact opposite.
Above
anything else, Dracula is transgression. When a given incarnation depicts him
as beholden to the mast, it is to a potentially more romantic past; even if
historically this was not true, he still remains sexually charged, emotionally
vibrant; he still has all the trappings of the Beauty and the Beast-romantic.
Even the number of his brides and his flaunting of conventionalized
relationship-paradigms is ultimately transgressive. And when the present is
mired in tradition, cluttered by an antique aesthetic, then it's Dracula's task
to counteract exactly this with radical modernism and a violation of the
aesthetics that have brought him forth - where once, Dracula rose and crept
from the shadows, he'll later look down upon humans in the depth. And so, in time,
I believe that Dracula will once again walk in sunlight.
Ultimately,
the Dracula-characters throughout history remain a grand projection of
empowerment...and interestingly, one for both males and females. He is the way
out of normative patriarchal structures and suffocating, abuse relationships
and familial structures, he is the easy hand to grasp, the male ID fulfilled.
He is nostalgia and exactly the character a given generation wants - whether
romantic and non-phallic, dominant and suave or bestial and brutal - Dracula
has been coded in a myriad of ways in a plethora of movies, books,
screen-plays...and games. Obviously. There is a reason why Vampire: The
Masquerade had such a huge appeal - it was a fin-de-siècle fantasy for the 21st
century, resonating with all of the aforementioned tropes and so much more,
without the perceived clutter of the "old" structures and sentences.
You see,
having read pretty much all of the classic pieces of dark romantic literature,
I can, without a doubt say, that many of them, to our day and age's
sensibilities, are somewhat plodding. Conditioned to enjoy short-lived and to
the point entertainment and immediate gratification, I have witnessed, though
never quite understood, the frustration with this literature. Until I had to
read it all during my MA. Oh boy. Confession-time: I'll never, ever touch
Dickens out of my own volition again. And Wieland, the first American gothic
novel actually made me fall asleep while reading it - feat only a select few
tomes have accomplished. I'm not the biggest fan of this kind of prose,
preferring more the engaging and challenging works of Modernism and
Post-Modernism. HOWEVER, I also encountered a lot of gems - I won't have to
tell you that Poe holds up to this date. You know it. And while e.g. "The
String of Pearls", the basis for the recently adapted Sweeny Todd-story
was a chore to read, other books weren't. Cue in Bram Stoker's Dracula. While
less frantic than most contemporary novels, this book remains, to this date, a
page-turner. The constantly changing perspectives of narrators and their
letters, diary entries etc. keep you engaged as you try to puzzle together the
components. And the book actually wastes no time for the "big reveal"
- you don't lose anything by knowing that Dracula is a vampire, nay, THE
vampire. The book, pretty much from the get-go, makes this clear and then is
all about struggling with this threat. And, from a gamer's perspective, the
characters actually behave pretty much like a roleplaying group in CoC, ToC, or
Night's Black Agents - you see different attributes and skills if you closely
look; you see the drives of the characters. One could almost ostensibly assume
it was a work penned about a certain horror campaign in Night's Black Agents
Stoker personally played...
Which
brings me full circle to this book - this is literature, yes. This is the
original Dracula...but it is more. The premise of this book is deceptively
simple: Dracula is real, there was a conspiracy, things went horribly wrong.
Now the original file has fallen into your hands - with annotations by no less
than three generations of agents fighting the vampiric conspiracy...or are
they? Dracula has always existed in the fringes, in the haze; the demarcation
line between light and day, passion and control, norms and rebellion - and now,
once again, his narrative is put into the context of a new age, a new medium
that is, much like Dracula, at the same time an old medium: This is a gaming
supplement and it is literature. It is a fusion of the old and new, of
nostalgia framed by no less than 3 meta-narratives - whose intrusion into the
text is handled surprisingly smart. In color-coded hand-written notes and
annotations, they tend to ultimately crop up in the filler-scenes, remark upon
small, seemingly unremarkable details...and add whole new meaning and
ultimately, terror to the book. When one can see the inevitable happy end
approaching, one knows that it's, in fact, not the end - and we get to know
why.
One of the
achievements of the annotations and new content is that they take the small
bits and pieces and point them out to the readers; Kenneth Hite and Gareth
Ryder-Hanrahan did their research: Did you know that the first, Icelandic
edition (Makt Myrkranna - Sagan af Drakúla greifa) of this book has a preface
that mentions Jack the Ripper? Well, I did, but only because I studied both
Icelandic and English literature extensively. Well, this book is full of such
interesting tidbits...and the sheer fact that the original Dracula and his
behaviors have become alien to our sensibilities, that he, indeed at this point
is different from our expectations of what Dracula is, makes reading this book
intriguing to say the least. But what about the clash of narrative voices? I
actually indulged in a little experiment and handed this book to a friend of
mine who had not read the original Dracula - and guess what? She was
flabbergasted when she realized that this was not all penned by Mr. Stoker -
Kenneth Hite and Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan have mastered the peculiarities of
Stoker's style and vocabulary to the dot and, as a whole, this rendered
"re-reading" Dracula actually a fulfilling experience, in spite of my
excellent memory..
How good is
my memory? Well, unless I have to look up a particular wording, I do not read
any books twice. I can still recall the plots of movies, books, comics...the
whole shebang I have consumed. My memory, at least for the purpose of retaining
this type of information, seems to be quite pronounced. This means I basically
remembered the whole original book. I still had more than just a bit of fun -
the 3 meta-narratives and their epochs that are reflected in verbiage and in
how they interact, lend a whole new dimension to an already inspired,
intriguing book and the new bits and pieces integrate so seamlessly into the
overarcing structure, they actually enhance the plot rather than just
stretching it - this is, in fact, a better piece of literature than the
original.
We are
gamers. We are roleplayers. This is literature and, at the same time, the most
massive hand-out I have ever held in my hands. So go out there, get this book,
preferably in print - and when your investigators or agents or simply
bibliophile players find a strange unredacted file, just hand them this book.
It's perhaps the most awesome set-up for a campaign you can wish for, a huge,
immersive facilitator of play, a book that they can analyze, engage and pick
apart - this is a gaming supplement, exceedingly educational for players and
GMs alike and a glorious supplement beyond the confines of Night's Black
Agents, though, obviously playing The Dracula Dossier will amplify the experience
beyond belief. By the way - those strange notes spread throughout the text?
Those numbers? They are here for a reason, but since that reason is relevant to
the gaming aspect and not necessarily required for the enjoyment of this book,
I'll cover them in the second part of this review - the one on the game
mechanics book, the Director's Handbook.
For now,
let me express my gratitude for reading my rambling analysis of this wonderful
supplement...and then go. Get this.
I'm
old-school, I'd suggest the bound hardcover I used when writing this. But the
pdf has also its glorious charm: Why? Because it's a glorious handout as well -
you can *tease* this book...perhaps the PCs find some pages with one annotation
type...and others that have another: You see, the pdf is layered and allows you
to turn on and off the annotations of the respective agents and even the text.
Hand them a white paper with only some cryptic annotations and watch agents
trying to find the obscure means of making the text reappear. Yes - this is
awesome from both an in-game and out-game point of view, exceedingly ambitious
and a sheer joy to read and digest - a Dracula for our age. Now go ahead and
weave your story with this, read a tale both old and new, literature that is a
game in its experience and in its nature as a supplement. You won't regret it.
My final
verdict, obviously, will clock in at 5 stars + seal of approval and though this
was released last year, I only managed to read an analyze it now - hence it is
nominated as a candidate for my Top Ten of 2016. Get this and read Dracula like
you've never read or experienced the yarn before.
Endzeitgeist
out.
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