Haunted by the memory of a showgirl…

Happy Halloween! In the spirit of it in this year 2022, I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time, after a friend on Twitter, the amazing Irish dominatrix SpoiltprincessG, mentioned that it was one of her favorite books. She is quite the reader and in fact that’s how we became acquainted online, when she told me she’d read some of my stories and we got to discussing other authors. In this 2019 post I recall what she thought of my book Fate of a Stripper.

I found Dracula truly an epic novel that illuminated many additional themes of a story so familiar from the innumerable Dracula or vampire films I’ve seen. One aspect of the original novel that never seems to show up in the movies is the deep comradeship between the young people, in late nineteenth century England, who are confronted with the monstrosity that is the blood-drinking count. The elderly, scholarly Dutch vampire fighter Dr. Van Helsing is their guide in the battle, but Stoker gives us a fuller sense of the circle of young men and women on whom Dracula preys, fuller than I can recall from any of the films I’ve seen–although Hammer’s initial 1958 Christopher Lee outing, Horror of Dracula, while heavily compressing the story, does capture some of the confusion and desperation of those under the siege of the fiend. Perhaps Francis Ford Coppola’s version captures some more of this; maybe I’ll re-watch it. Unfortunately, when I saw it thirty years ago in its original release, the movie made almost no impression on me. I don’t recall why.

In any case, being in this supernatural frame of mind, also having enjoyed the ghost stories of British writer Algernon Blackwood during the summer too, as well as revisiting Edgar Allan Poe’s essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” I thought I’d go for a change of pace in my own fiction writing, as I do now and then, with the result that I just published this short tale, “DO YOU REMEMBER ME, LILY?” 

It was initially inspired by the true story of a famous showgirl and burlesque dancer named Faith Bacon who committed suicide back in the 1950s. You can read about her on Wikipedia here. I’ve long thought about her tragic life and imagined what effect her death might have had on her fans, so using this as a plot springboard, I created a character named Lily Dyrell who is driven to a similar fate and whose self-destruction haunts one of her longtime admirers.

Walking around Times Square’s side streets nowadays, one sees amid all the boring new glassy construction the old buildings still standing here and there, so evocative of the noirish past. I decided to take a photo for my cover to get a flavor of world “Lily Dyrell” and her fan “Arthur J. Merkellin” would have moved through.

Obviously my story is not an epic like Dracula but a short, modest tale in the Poesque mode of composition, aiming to create the effects of both fear and sadness as Arthur, confronted with Lily’s spirit, comes to a heartbreaking realization about what was going through the head of his now-deceased dancing goddess.

“DO YOU REMEMBER ME, LILY?” is available at Amazon worldwide as an ebook that can be read on tablets, computers, phones, and Kindles.

By the way, here is the edition of Dracula that I read. The striking face on the cover, which to me looked like a combination of both Bela Lugosi and George Zucco, horror movie kings of the 1940s, was actually a portrait of the Victorian-era British superstar Henry Irving in the role of Mephistopheles. Bram Stoker worked for Irving for many years and the character of Dracula was indeed partly inspired by the actor’s commanding personality.

Finally, if you read and enjoy my new ebook, you might also savor the twists and turns of my supernatural femdom erotica tale, The Dominatrix Who Couldn’t Die, also available as an ebook at Amazon.