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An Englishman staying in Munich sets out by carriage on Walpurgis Night, ignoring his driver's warnings, and wanders alone into an abandoned village. A…
An Englishman staying in Munich sets out by carriage on Walpurgis Night, ignoring his driver's warnings, and wanders alone into an abandoned village. A sudden snowstorm drives him to shelter in a strange marble tomb, and he discovers that something in the darkness is watching over him. This is the title story of a collection of tales of the supernatural.
Context and significance
Bram Stoker's widow published the collection in 1914, two years after his death, and explained that the title story had been cut from the original manuscript of Dracula. It reads as a chilling prelude to the novel, and the other stories show Stoker's taste for the weird and the macabre.
About the author
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) was born in Dublin, a sickly child confined to bed until he was seven, who grew into a university athlete. He worked as a civil servant and an unpaid theatre critic, until his admiration for the actor Henry Irving led him to London, where for twenty-seven years he managed Irving's Lyceum Theatre.
In his spare time he wrote novels and stories, and after years of research into folklore and Eastern Europe published Dracula in 1897. It was only moderately successful in his lifetime, but it gave the modern world its image of the vampire. His widow published Dracula's Guest after his death.