Sunday Shorts is a series where I blog about short fiction – from flash to novellas. For the time being, I’m sticking to prose, although it’s been suggested I could expand this feature to include single episodes of anthology television series like The Twilight Zone or individual stories/issues of anthology comics (like the 1970s DC horror or war anthology titles). So anything is possible. But for now, the focus is on short stories.
As a fan of Bram Stoker in general and his most famous novel specifically (some would say “fanatic” is the more accurate term), I’m always curious about works that expand, expound upon, or deconstruct, Dracula. Even works I don’t enjoy will give me some new insight into my favorite novel, or at least insight into how other people regard it. And if I do like the work, even better!
Gwendolyn Kiste’s “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt from Lucy Westenra’s Diary)”, from Nightmare Magazine #86 (November 2019), fair fully blew me away. It’s a wonderful deconstruction/reconstruction of a part of the novel that often gets ignored or conflated/downplayed by media adaptations: the life and death(s) of Lucy Westenra. Thanks to movie and television focus on independent, poor-but-plucky Mina Murray and her eventual marriage to damaged hero Jonathan Harker, people tend to forget that the novel features two female leads and that one of them doesn’t fare quite so well as the other. (And with the recent penchant for making Mina Dracula’s reincarnated soulmate or current lover, poor Lucy gets even less attention. But that’s a post for another time.)
Stoker gives us some of his original story in Lucy’s POV mostly via letters to Mina about Lucy’s courtship by three dashing young men of very different backgrounds – but you have to squint hard to see past the flighty exterior presented. What little else we know of Lucy we know from Mina’s own journal entries. Stoker never quite gives Lucy the introspective moments Mina experiences, especially once Lucy suffers her first death and we lose her POV.
Kiste gives us what is missing from the original work: Lucy’s inner self, conflicted over how she had to act to survive in high society and fulfill her mother’s expectations. The entire story is narrated by Lucy post-death, listing out how each of her friends, would-be-saviors, Dracula, and even society itself contributed to the end we see her receive in the novel. It starts out feeling like we’re just going to get a litany of blame – but as the diary entries go on, the story becomes so much more. Kiste doesn’t reveal anything regarding Lucy’s final death in the novel that many authors haven’t also revealed about Dracula (and Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla, and other such creatures); the twist is what Lucy will do next.
The key to the story is the voice Kiste gives Lucy – there are glimmers of the flightiness and flirtiness we see in the original novel, but Kiste builds off of the few more serious moments Stoker gives to reveal a Lucy who knows exactly what her place in British society is and rails against it – and who discovers the power to do something about it.