The Lair of the White Worm (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
By Bram Stoker
2.5/5
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About this ebook
The last (1911) novel by the author of Dracula is a terror classic. A young Australian heir to a British castle finds himself embroiled in mystery, murder, and a plague of snakes—all pointing to the sinister guardian of a deep pit, inhabited by a hideous monster.
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker (1847–1912) grew up in Ireland listening to his mother's tales of blood-drinking fairies and vampires rising from their graves. He later managed the Lyceum Theatre in London and worked as a civil servant, newspaper editor, reporter, and theater critic. Dracula, his best-known work, was published in 1897 and is hailed as one of the founding pieces of Gothic literature.
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Reviews for The Lair of the White Worm (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)
116 ratings14 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If you loved Dracula and expect something similar good... forget it. The Lair of the White Worm is a chaotic, illogical, predictable and disappointingly boring book. And, as the others said, harshly racist even considering the era it was written. It has few (very few) good moments but on the whole... crap.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I quite enjoyed Dracula, so I had every expectation of liking this as well, but I was sadly mistaken; something somewhere went horribly wrong between the two. The plot is a mismash of threads that are either completely nonsensical or simply dropped after having added nothing to the story, and the characters speak in such a stilted manner that it crosses the line into unintentional humor. The characterization is more or less nonexistent (Mimi, earlier so fiercely protective of Lilla, proceeds to essentially abandon her to her fate), and their actions seem to have no basis in reason whatsoever. Even having finished it, I still have absolutely no idea what was going on the vast majority of the time. While I am usually fairly understanding of the fact that older books are rather less PC than anything that would get published today, it's also worth noting that this book is painfully racist, to the point that it's difficult to overlook. Absolutely not recommended by any means.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Adam Salton travels from Australia to England to live with his uncle and eventually inherit the family estate. He becomes involved in the neighborhood intrigues when he meets Lady Arabella March and Edgar Caswell. Caswell has recently returned from abroad and has become obsessed with mesmerism. Lady Arabella is a strange tall white figure who wants to marry Caswell and will do anything to get him.This novel suffers from being gothic. It's an alright story, but there is so much talking about the local legends and folklore and talking about what the hero will do next and just plain sitting around and talking. Another problem with the writing is the author switches from one character's story to another with no real segue. I started the book thinking this was Adam's story then about a few chapters in it became Caswell's story and then it abruptly switched to Lady Arabella and then back to Adam.I feel I should warn anyone who may be sensitive to racial prejudice. Caswell has an African servant who dabbles in voodoo and falls in love with Lady Arabella. He is treated rather poorly for daring to want to marry a rich white women and it referred to by the author and the characters by the n word. The use of the n word is disturbing to modern ears. You are forewarned.If you like gothic literature there are better novels out there. I recommend this book to anyone who is a Bram Stoker fan and wants to read all of his novels.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5I can’t remember why I had this sitting around on my ereader (apart from it being public domain and therefore free). I think it might be because it was supposedly an influence in Stephen King’s short story “Jersualem’s Lot” in Night Shift, which I quite liked, but since then I’ve read Stoker’s Dracula and really didn’t like it. Compared to The Lair of the White Worm, though, Dracula is a beautiful masterpiece. This is a really, really, really bad book. Even amongst Gothic scholars, Stoker’s die-hard fans and general lovers of old-timey English horror literature, The Lair of the White Worm is a rambling and nonsensical novel.The plot, such as it is, involves young colonial lad Adam Shaw returning to the motherland at the invitation of his great-uncle, who wishes to pass on his Staffordshire mansion to him. But it turns out one of their neighbours is an ancient and monstrous wyrm-like creature in human guise, so they take it upon themselves to destroy her. There are also weird psychic battles between unrelated characters, a horrifically racist caricature of an African voodoo priest, and a gigantic kite which controls birds or something? I gave up trying to follow the plot after about forty pages. Oh, and despite being set in 1860, the climax involves copious amounts of dynamite, which wasn’t invented until 1867.It explained a lot when I found out The Lair of the White Worm was written after Stoker had a a number of strokes in the midst of tertiary syphilis, and he died not long after finishing it. Apparently the original version had forty chapters; I appear to have read the edited 1925 version which removed almost a hundred pages, and thank God for that. I can’t imagine the malarkey that would have gone on in those extra chapters. The Lair of the White Worm is an outright bad novel, and was only published because it was written by an extremely popular author and would have sold no matter what its pages contained.(And what the hell’s going on with that cover? Why does the Worm have arms?)
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I loved Dracula, and liked The Jewel of Seven Stars, and since this is supposed to be Stoker's third most highly regarded book, I decided to give it a read...It is rather disappointing. Besides the embarrassingly racist descriptions of the African servant, the ending is quite a letdown. It is somewhat strange, as well as anti-climactic. I'll just leave it at that, in case anyone else is still interested in reading it. Also, while there is some decent build up in the early and middle parts of this book which borrows from English folk tales, the dialogue between Adam Salton and Nathaniel de Salis can be a bit long winded at times.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Effective horror story that is simply too talkative. Creepy and Atmospheric.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was Stoker's final novel, but it isn't a patch on Dracula. While it does contain a few vivid and quite graphically horrific scenes, much of it is bland and reads woodenly. A disappointment. 3/5
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Young Australian Adam Salton arrives in England at the invitation of his lonely old uncle. The younger Salton soon makes the acquaintance of his uncle's brave friend, Sir Nathaniel, the beautiful Watford cousins, Edgar Caswell, who owns the local castle and has a infamous family history, and the woman pursuing him, Lady Arabella, who makes Caswell look like an angel in comparison.I read Dracula two years ago and loved it so much, and maybe I shouldn't have expected as much from this book, written much later and published just the year before Stoker's death. The first 35 pages were dull, dull, dull- then it picked up a little, then went back to pages of talking. However, when Stoker wants to terrify his reader he doesn't mess around. There is a death scene that is surprisingly graphic and chilling, especially considering the majority of the book has a Victorian tone. Like, why would two grown women who are being terrorized by certain people to the point of chasing them from the house, continue to have them over for tea just because the invitation has been extended?I give this one a guarded 3 stars with the warning that this is a chatty horror story.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book is written in the style of many early horror writers. The plot is developed very slowly and even when you reach the end you are not so sure that the "white worm" was really worth a this fuss. The main characters could have simply moved out of town but are somehow driven to confront this evil woman/worm. There is also a very racist portrayal of a black character which was also typical of many authors in the late 18 and early 1900's. The book is what it is a generally entertaining but flawed book by the author of Dracula.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Adam Salton comes to England to meet his great-uncle and establish a new life in Derbyshire, meets the woman of his dreams, and battles a monster that has plagued the area for centuries. What a gosh-darned mess this is. The story has a lot of potential, but as it was first published in a 40-chapter novel that was then abridged into a 24-chapter version, the pacing is off; it is lucid at times and nothing short of incoherent in others. Beware that, for a modern reader, it is also so blatantly racist that some lines almost gave me hiccups. Stoker had been sick for many years while writing this (and died the year after it was published) and I can only assume that there was some mental ramifications to his illness. Ken Russell made an oddly entertaining film version in the 1980s, starring Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi, which I am reluctantly fond of, so I liked the book a little more than I normally would have because of that.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The pace of this was incredibly slow and it was just full of rubbish brought into the story for a reason and then abandoned. ( I’m looking at you mongoose). The amount of racism throughout the story was unreal. Stoker really batters you over the head with it.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Bram Stoker’s The Lair of the White Worm was his final novel, first published in 1911 one year prior to his death. He based the story upon the legend of the Lambton Worm from County Durham in North East England. In the original legend, John Lambton, heir to the Lambton Estate, battles a giant worm (from “wyrm,” meaning dragon) that terrorized local villages.In Stoker’s novel, an Australian named Adam Salton travels to Derbyshire where his uncle wishes to make him his heir. At a neighboring estate, Edgar Caswall makes mesmeric assault upon a local girl, Lilla Watford, while Arabella March works to enchant Caswall. Salton, finding a great many black snakes on the property, hires a mongoose to hunt them. When it attacks Arabella, she shoots it to death, later tearing a second mongoose apart with her bare hands. Adam and Sir Nathaniel de Salis, a friend of his uncle, make plans to stop Arabella, with Salis taking on a Van Helsing role. In the end, Adam, Mimi, and Salis use dynamite to destroy the White Worm and the house that contains it.Stoker’s novel is steeped in class conflict, with various figures threatening the established order through their intentions to move between classes. Adam, as an Australian on his way to becoming a lord, is a novelty. Stoker portrays Arabella’s intentions on Edgar, however, as both a threat to the class structure and to gender roles, as she aggressively pursues Edgar beyond the expectations for women of the time. An African servant named Oolanga, however, makes this novel decidedly racist in addition to its classist commentary. Stoker writes Oolanga’s dialogue in dialect, portraying him as more animal than man, with his greatest threat being his dream to marry Arabella and make her love him. When she kills him, Stoker focuses the reader’s attention not to the brutal murder of a man, but on how coldly Arabella killed him.In the introduction to this edition of the novel, the Pulp Fictions series editor writes, “No apologies are offered for delighting again in these tales of wonder and fantastic adventure. Please put you critical faculties in neutral and bask in the pure pulp escapism that these tales evoke” (pg. i). That, however, is quite impossible once one reads the sections with Oolanga. Adding further issues, this edition reprints the abridged 28-chapter 1925 version of Stoker’s novel rather than the original 40-chapter novel. While of interest to those studying late Victoriana or the fiction of the Edwardian era, it will likely not entertain casual readers as much as Stoker’s more famous Dracuala. The reader is instead directed to Ken Russell’s 1988 film loosely based on this novel, as it cuts the racism in favor of a more bizarre snake-god-cum-vampire tale that will better entertain in its strangeness.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Um, wow. As someone who really loved Dracula, I was expecting this book to be a tad better than the colossal disappointment it turned out to be. I realize that racism was the norm back in the Olden Days, but this goes above and beyond the standard 19th century phobia of minorities. The plot was a strange mix of predictability and confusing nonsense. As someone who has the deductive abilities of a potato,I realized that Lady March was the "White Worm" around two seconds after her character was introduced. Was it supposed to be suspenseful? It also introduces and promptly abandons characters. It had potential, but Bram Stoker must have been having the worst case of writer's block ever or something. Pity.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An interesting and sexy story. Not really scary but intuitive.