Christopher Fowler: Night After Night of the Living Dead

The best thing about the dead is you can't get pregnant from sitting on a chair they've just been sitting on, like you can with live people. When live people warm up the seat (especially the toilet seat - that's where AIDS comes from) and you sit on it after them and it's still warm, the heat activates the hormones in your body and fertilizes the eggs, and nine months later you have a baby. But the dead don't leave warm seats because their body temperature is about the same as winter tap water.

The worst thing about the dead is they don't sleep, so if you go downstairs for a glass of water in the middle of the night you're liable to find my grandpa sitting at the kitchen table staring off into the dark, and this frankly gives me the creeps. We have the Night Of The Living Dead to thank for all of this. The most interesting thing about that occasion (apart from the fact that it happened in the middle of the afternoon) is that such a cataclysmic event didn't seem to bother many people at the time. Personally speaking I find that weird because I was only eleven when it happened and it fucked me up considerably, I can tell you.

You probably know all about it - I mean you'd have to have been living in a monastery on the Orkney Islands for the last three years to avoid knowing - but I'll tell you anyway, because (a) it will give like a personal perspective on the whole thing and (b) I'm doing this as my mid-term English essay.

For a start, it was nothing like the movie.

Christopher Fowler: Dracula’s Library

Jonathan Harker stays on at Dracula’ s Castle, but at what cost to hisimmortal soul . . . ?

BEING A DIARY chronicle of the true and hitherto unrevealed fate of Jonathan Harker, discovered within the pages of an ancient book.

From The Journal of Jonathan Harker, 2 July
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I have always believed that a building can be imbued with thepersonality of its owner, but never have I felt such a dread ache of melancholy as I experienced upon entering that terrible, desolateplace. The castle itself – less a chateau than a fortress, much like theone that dominates the skyline of Salzburg –
is very old, thirteenthcentury by my reckoning, and a veritable masterpiece of unadorned ugliness. Little has been added across the years to make the interiormore bearable for human habitation. There is now glass in manyof the windows and mouldering tapestries adorn the walls, but atnight the noise of their flapping reveals the structure’s inadequateprotection from the elements. The ramparts are unchanged fromtimes when hot oil was poured on disgruntled villagers who came tocomplain about their murderous taxes. There is one entrance only,sealed by a portcullis and a pair of enormous studded doors. Water isdrawn up from a great central well by a complicated wooden pump-contraption. Gargoyles sprout like toadstools in every exposedcorner. The battlements turn back the bitter gales that forever sweepthe Carpathian mountains, creating a chill oasis within, so that onemay cross the bailey – that is, the central courtyard of the castle –  without being blasted away into the sky.

     But it is the character of the Count himself that provides thecastle with its most singular feature, a pervading sense of loss andloneliness that would penetrate the bravest heart and break it if admitted. The wind moans like a dying child, and even the weak sunlight that passes into the great hall is drained of life and hope bythe cyanic stained glass through which it is filtered.