Today’s guest is Tucker, the apparently tireless and unflaggingly devoted heart and mind behind Dracula Beyond Stoker. This magazine is a digital and print publication which does its part in preserving the legacy of Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic novel. Stoker’s story – despite predecessors like Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla, or John Polidori’s The Vampyre – remains the most famous and influential of Vampire stories. From the OG Nosferatu’s Count Orlok played by Max Schreck, to Willem Defoe playing Max Schreck playing Count Orlok in Shadow of the Vampire, from the erotic fascination of Anne Rice or the Twilight Series, the abjection of 30 Days of Night, the melancholy of Let the Right One In, the ferocity of Thirst, and the hilarity of What We Do in the Shadows – the fascination with the vampire-as-monster-object is very much alive (or should we say undead) in the cultural imagination, to speak nothing of its veracity in folklore. Even more than the sanguine specter of the Vampire as monster, Stoker’s Dracula leans heavily on famously gothic tropes and motifs which I refer to as “the love beast”. A love-beast being something terrible and inhuman but seductive and agonizing. Dracula made the Vampire a monster that young girls might eroticize in their imaginations: a dark and mysterious stranger from another land, one who has crossed oceans of time to find them.
Dracula Beyond Stoker features original fiction by contemporary writers, imagining the characters, the locations, the events, and even Bram Stoker, himself, in various potential iterations and incarnations. The catalog is an invitation to participate in something timeless and irrefutably ingrained within our collective imaginations, to be a part of a waking, breathing mythology. To, if we are so lucky, be selected to contribute to the expansion of that mythology. In addition to a series of unique new stories which grow the canon of Dracula, each publication features original and thematic art. The quality of the cover art was what first fascinated me about these issues. The unique, color-drenched paintings are reminiscent of the delicious pulpiness which has been gradually replaced by AI designs and clip-art pastiche. I was also taken in by the staggering amount of love, of devotion, and perhaps even obsession, it takes to maintain the steady tributary stream the magazine feeds into the Dracula river. Tucker really loves Dracula. One might even posit that he’s become something of a less addled, and more charming Renfield, allowing author after author to spill a little of their creative lifeblood to keep the Count and his growing mythos more alive and mesmerizing than ever.
Where can you find Tucker and DBS Press?
Website: https://www.dbspress.com/
Instagram: @draculabeyondstoker
Twitter: @dbs_press
Update: As of the publishing of this video, submissions for the “Suitors” edition of Dracula Beyond Stoker Magazine are open and will remain so until June 30th! Get yours in!
And now for your requisite episode fancy-quote:
“Inevitably linked with the moment of climax, there is a minor rupture suggestive of death; and conversely the idea of death may play a part in setting sensuality in motion.” Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality, P. 107
A Monster Who Revels: Dracula with Tucker Christine of DBS Press