The Lair of the White Worm

Young Adam Salton comes from Australia to visit his great-uncle in the English Midlands, and discovers that the beautiful, cold Lady Arabella March is in fact the human form of an ancient giant white serpent that lives in a deep pit beneath her house, while the half-mad landowner Edgar Caswall tries to dominate a young woman, Lilla, through mesmerism, and flies a huge kite over the countryside.

Bram Stoker published his last novel in 1911, a year before his death; strange and disordered, it has become a cult classic and was filmed by Ken Russell in 1988. Read Dracula and The Jewel of Seven Stars.

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.