New in paperback: The story of the mind behind the monster (and the monster within the mind)-a tale of obsession and hero worship in Victorian England. "What a splendid subject to sink one's teeth into," raved the Washington Post . Here was a six-foot-two Irishman with a red bearda Victorian family man, a spirited debater, and the author of novels and short stories largely forgotten today. All, of course, except for Dracula , which has enjoyed countless stage and screen incarnations and haunted the dreams of many generations. Bram Stoker lived at the very center of late-Victorian social and artistic life and numbered among his friends Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, James Whistler, William Gladstone, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. But it was his relationship with the mesmerizing, domineering actor Henry Irving that may have played the most crucial role in Stoker's lifea real-life monster who ultimately led to Stoker's most famous creation. In this book that the Baltimore Sun called "superb," Barbara Belford draws on unpublished archival material to reveal the links between the reticent author's life, his vampire tale, and the political, occult, cultural, and sexual background of the 1890s.