A Star Trap

Written by Bram Stoker

Narrated by James Langton

An old man recounts the story of a death he witnessed as a young boy working in the theater: His boss, Mr. Haliday, had married a pretty young lady from the theater, much to the chagrin of the other women working in the company. It was a marriage of convenience, but in the beginning they got along well enough. After a handsome younger man, Henry Mortimer, joins the theater company, Mrs. Haliday and Mortimer start up a romance that everyone but Mr. Haliday seem to notice. However, during a performance one night, something seems to go terrible wrong as a piece of equipment falls from the stage and kills Mortimer. Although it seems like a simple stage malfunction, the young theater boy notices something that the rest do not -- a strange piece of metal that he found on stage immediately following the death of Mortimer that seems to say that Mr. Haliday wasn't as clueless as everyone had thought about the actions of his wife and the handsome young actor.
Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was an Irish writer of novels and short stories, most famous for his gothic horror novel Dracula. Although he wrote throughout his life while working as a personal assistant and theatre manager, he did not achieve much literary fame until after his death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469086019

Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was an Irish novelist. Born in Dublin, Stoker suffered from an unknown illness as a young boy before entering school at the age of seven. He would later remark that the time he spent bedridden enabled him to cultivate his imagination, contributing to his later success as a writer. He attended Trinity College, Dublin from 1864, graduating with a BA before returning to obtain an MA in 1875. After university, he worked as a theatre critic, writing a positive review of acclaimed Victorian actor Henry Irving’s production of Hamlet that would spark a lifelong friendship and working relationship between them. In 1878, Stoker married Florence Balcombe before moving to London, where he would work for the next 27 years as business manager of Irving’s influential Lyceum Theatre. Between his work in London and travels abroad with Irving, Stoker befriended such artists as Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Hall Caine, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 1895, having published several works of fiction and nonfiction, Stoker began writing his masterpiece Dracula (1897) while vacationing at the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel in Cruden Bay, Scotland. Stoker continued to write fiction for the rest of his life, achieving moderate success as a novelist. Known more for his association with London theatre during his life, his reputation as an artist has grown since his death, aided in part by film and television adaptations of Dracula, the enduring popularity of the horror genre, and abundant interest in his work from readers and scholars around the world.