The Bats in the Belfry, The Blood in the Veins
Dracula, Annotation, and the Fiction of Truth
Voices from beyond the grave. For an ancient demon, Count Dracula was surprisingly keen to embrace the modern world.
Before Sherlock. Before Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Before Twilight and Blade. There was Dracula — and behind him, a vast mix-match of typewriters, phonographs, diaries, newspaper clippings, and the odd grave-robbing gentleman of leisure.
But what happens when fiction itself becomes the disguise for fact?
The Literary Engine of Dracula
Bram Stoker’s Dracula didn’t just define a genre — and give cape sellers hope for a future in retail — really it redefined how stories could be told.
Instead of a single voice, we hear a chorus: Mina’s journal, Jonathan’s letters, Dr Seward’s wax cylinder. The novel unfolds through ephemera — the detritus of modern life. Telegrams. Newspaper clippings. Train timetables. How very postmodern, way before that was even thought of as an excuse for boring lectures.
And it’s more than narrative gimmickry. This multi-perspective form feels startlingly contemporary. Stoker mimics how truth is uncovered in the real world: slowly, partially, across fragmented documents and voices.
“Voices from beyond the grave. For an ancient demon, Count Dracula was surprisingly keen to embrace the modern world…”
Modern Tech and the Making of Monsters
What makes Dracula especially thrilling is its use of modern devices — the phonograph in particular — to tell an ancient, undead story.
At the time, the phonograph was bleeding-edge technology (without the doomscrolling). But in Stoker’s hands, it becomes a Ghostbusters-style ghost-trap. A new kind of haunting. The dead don’t just walk among us — they speak from wax cylinders.
Here, the supernatural cohabits with science. The vampire doesn’t hide from modernity. He inhabits it. It’s a fascinating take — that something so ancient is so keen not to hide from the future, but to embrace it. After all, aren’t all those cosy fireside chats so the Count can hear all about ‘Modern Britain’.?
And the archive becomes the perfect place to bury — or reveal — true horror.
Along with Jack the Ripper, the Count ushers in a very modern and brutal century, and what other City could they do that from? London…
Vampires Find Their Natural Home
We tend to think of the vampire as lurking watchers in Transylvanian forests. But Dracula is at his most terrifying not in his home, but in ours, in London.
The fog. The class systems. Gaslight and cobblestones. A city where shadows are part of the infrastructure. Stoker drags the gothic from castles to capital. The vampire doesn’t just survive in London — he thrives there. And why not? It is hundreds of times fuller of shadows and murder than rural Eastern Europe.
And also, a great food source. For convenience, it’s a vampire’s Tesco Metro.
Victorian London is the ideal feeding ground: bureaucratic, repressed, secretive. A city so filled with concealment it swallows monsters whole and still functions.
Stoker’s genius was to make the horror of the Carpathian’s at first remote and exotic, and then bring it to the parlours of polite society.
“It was such a great idea, we simply had to steal it…”
Leonard Woolf and the Annotated Trick
Decades after Dracula’s first swoop over our heads, Leonard Woolf — of the Hogarth Press — saw something else in its pages. Something subversive.
His “annotated” edition didn’t just treat Dracula as a novel. It treated it as a historical document. With footnotes, scholarly digressions, and editorial interruptions, it blurred the line between fiction and reality.
Suddenly, Dracula wasn’t just a story. It was a dossier. A secret history posing as literature.
It was such a great idea, we simply had to steal it.
Truth Disguised as Fiction: Enter Manton Marble
That blurred line is where The Annotated Casebooks of Professor Manton Marble begins.
Author Dom Salmon takes inspiration from both Stoker’s epistolary structure and Woolf’s faux-scholarly framing — and goes a step further. In The Death at the Door, the first in the Marble series, the “truth” has been buried not by myth — but by paperwork. (Bureaucracy’s Kafka-esque labyrinths may be all digital now, but it’s a very familiar pain in the ass).
Set in 1929, we meet Hamilton Earle: a quiet, unassuming civil servant reassigned to a vast, secret library buried under Westminster. His job? Catalogue the unsorted, unblock the backlog. Impose order on the disorderly reams of documents that cover wall, after dusty wall deep underground.
But among the receipts, misfiled pamphlets, and anonymous donations, he finds something else.
A set of fantastical novels. So what? Such was the fashion that was, what’s a few, bound penny dreadfuls got to do with modern life?
But then he realises the marginalia, ephemera, redactions around him. The lumber receipts. The field notes. The shipping manifests. The mortuary notes. The annotated inconsistencies. The weather reports. Everything that surrounds him, with a bit of digging, is proof that everything in the novels is actually true.
Earle realises they’re not novels at all.
They are coded case files.
It’s the ultimate red string and pinboard puzzle. And the more string and pins he makes, the more it all joins up.
Or so he thinks.
I mean if you were alone in an acre wide library under London, night after night, after night, with little to do, would you really trust your judgement after a time?
Big Bangs and their Aftershocks
Dracula was a Big Bang moment for modern horror. A novel that re-wired how we think about voice, archive, and fear.
Manton Marble is its inheritor — not through imitation, but evolution. Where Dracula gave us monsters, Salmon gives us systems. Bureaucracies. Civil servants. The quiet offices where horror is misfiled under “Pending”.
Where Dracula layered voices, Manton layers data.
Where Woolf disguised fiction as fact, Salmon hides fact within fiction — and lets the reader do the work of excavation.
Much love as ever, The Datura Press…
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