Delta Rhythm Boys singing “Dry Bones.”
I should have remembered that it was Ezekiel who was the original source for a song we used to sing in elementary school. It took this old video of the Delta Rhythm Boys singing “Dry Bones” to put me straight last Saturday. The reason I was looking for it on YouTube then was that a Pilates class got me thinking about how the sections of my backbone connected. I’m glad to share this in time for Halloween, when bones are a thing!
Dracula is also a thing at Halloween, and so a recent literary discovery is another just-in-time item. At Public Radio International, you can learn about a newly discovered Bram Stoker story — written before his Dracula masterpiece but unknown until now.
From The World: “All Dracula-inspired movies, TV shows and breakfast cereals can be traced back to a story published in 1897 by the Irish writer Bram Stoker. His work is honored annually at the Bram Stoker Festival. … This year, the festival will highlight a a scary but lesser-known tale called ‘Gibbet Hill.’ …
“The story was published seven years before the original Dracula came to be, but received little attention until blogger and Stoker enthusiast, Brian Cleary, rediscovered the story in a library. Cleary joined The World’s host Carol Hills to discuss his forgotten find.
“Carol Hills: Give us a brief synopsis of the short story, but no spoilers.
“Brian Cleary: The narrator of the story is a man who’s leaving London and going down to Surrey for a walk in a place called Gibbet Hill. He encounters what’s called the Sailor’s Stone. The stone is there because the sailor was murdered by three thieves, and they were actually gibbetted [and the bodies were] displayed as a warning to other criminals. Stoker sets his story off from that jumping-off point. …
“Hills: Tell us how you found this short story, “Gibbet Hill.”
Cleary : I was interested in Stoker for years. I read Dracula when I was 12. I moved to Marino when I was an adult. Marino is where Bram Stoker was born. So, I was interested in local history and probably spent the last 15 years or so reading about every little detail I could get on Bram Stoker. I had some free time and ended up in the National Library of Ireland. While there, I systematically searched the British newspaper archives for all articles mentioning Bram Stoker between 1880 and 1897, when he published Dracula.
“A few weeks into that process, after reviewing a few thousand results, I got lucky. I hit on an advertisement for Christmas Supplement, the Dublin edition of the Daily Express, and it was referring to something published two weeks prior to that. The supplement had a story called ‘Gibbet Hill,’ by Bram Stoker, which just froze me in my seat because I knew this was something that I hadn’t come across before. I did some quick searches, and it was not on the internet or in any of the Stoker biographies or bibliographies. So, I went racing back through the editions of the Daily Express, got back to the relevant one from December 17th, and sure enough, there it was. …
“Hills: What went through your mind when you realized, ‘Jeez, this is a big find’?
“Cleary Well, I’m sitting in this churchlike atmosphere. It’s a Victorian building, big, high domed ceilings and beautiful, old paneled walls. So, it’s a really reverent space. And I’m holding my breath and I’m reading it, and I’m surrounded by proper historians and real writers. I just want to shout out and tell people what I found. But I just put my head down and read through, and I was amazed. It was a really good ghost story, you know, it was on a par with some of his other well-known short stories. …
“Hills: ‘Gibbet Hill,’ was written seven years before Dracula, but what does it tell you about Bram Stoker’s evolution as a writer? …
“Cleary: It shows how he was gradually working his way up to this masterpiece. So, in March 1890, he made the first notes for Dracula. … During that year, he went to Whitby for summer holidays in August 1890. While he was there, he got a book out of the library, and he found the term ‘dracula’ in that book, and he wrote it down lots of times. I think he liked how it sounded on his tongue. And then a few weeks later he was writing ‘Gibbet Hill.’ So, there are themes. … You can see he’s very much a writer developing his craft.” Lots more at The World, here.
Note to Hannah: Did we go see The Horror of Dracula together as young teens? On Fire Island? It made an impression on me that has lasted all these years.
Photo: John and Suzanne’s Mom.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 