"Now Speaks the Devil": The Story of an Unproduced Screenplay

Now Speaks the Devil was begun in 1984. First titled The Way, a first draft was completed around 1986, with a final draft completed in 1991, then re-edited again for its current publication by Ambler House (with the fine assistance of Bookbaby).

This was the second screenplay I completed and the first I considered good enough to show around Hollywood. My first, Under the Gun, was an ersatz “Dirty Harry” farrago about a right-wing cop forced to team up with a potheaded hippie to wage war against a gang of neo-Nazis on the rampage. I killed off the entire population of San Francisco in the course of 120 stupid pages. It remains a-moldering deep in the file cabinet.

I feel quite a bit better about Now Speaks the Devil, though it’s a sophomore effort.The plot uses that old reliable McGuffin—dirty money lost and found. Its initial spark was an article in, as I recall, The San Francisco Chronicle about a young Christian man who found $10,000 cash in a bag in an underground Muni station. After some undoubtedly intense prayer, he wisely decided to turn it over to the police. A month passed, no one showed up to claim the money, and so it became his.

Yes, that used to be the practice, once upon a time. The chap was likely the last ever allowed to reclaim found treasure before the policy was ended in response to the intensifying “War on Drugs.”

My muse immediately fell into “what if” mode. Might the young man be a fool in telling the whole world about his windfall? That whole world includes the money’s original owners. To my evil mind, he’d hung a “shoot me” sign around his neck.

I know if I were a certain kind of bad guy, I’d want that money back. And I’d stop at nothing to get it.

And so I set to work. The initial title was The Way.

THE VERY—VERY—BAD

One of my favorite Hitchcock truisms is “the better the villain, the better the movie.”

The villain of this piece was all saddled up to ride. He’d been already lurking the alleys of my brain since the late 1960s. Some regular visitors to this space and those who know me elsewhere, will already know who he is.

Namely, this guy.

Yup. That guy.

Sadly, by the mid-1980s, Lee Van Cleef’s thirty-year career was in its final fade. The great movie villain had not aged well and his films of the last ten years or so ranged from mediocre to unwatchable. I’d tired of seeing him in bad movies and had about given up.

Still, he remained an enormously charismatic, ideal bad guy. Now the Speaks the Devil was, in great part, an attempt to lift him from obscurity. It would be kind the kind of movie he should have been in: a sophisticated, solid thriller. He would have something better than decent to leave behind, a farewell worthy of John Wayne’s in The Shootist. A great movie? Maybe not. Just good. Most of the time, that’s good enough.

It might well have worked out that way, too. I named my villain Thornton and all his scenes are first draft, with only minor editing over the years.

Whatever else readers thought, everyone who read this loved to hate Thornton. I bet you will, too. He’s an avatar for movie villains everywhere.

THE INNOCENT

While I had my antagonist from the first keystroke, the protagonist, the mouse in this ruthless cat-and-mouse game, was struggle and nightmare from start to finish.

The young man in the original news article was, I recall, an Evangelical. My acquaintance with religion was about nil, though I admired traditional Christianity from a distance for its ritual and music. Nevertheless, my consciousness was mired in a swampy nihilism where all faith traditions seemed “the same” to me.

I created a family for this man, the classic stereotype from the 1950s: dad, mom, and two kids. I built them a house in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City. The theme of the necessary loss of innocence seemed to require they live outside of Babylon to make their naiveté credible.

I first named my protagonist “Zeke,” a diminutive of “Ezekiel,” which I plucked at random out of the Old Testament. Robert Redford could’ve played him, someone of wide-eyed and stubborn innocence, a very likable if dangerous naïf. He’s a cousin to Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest and characters in Eric Ambler—the ordinary man over his head in extraordinary circumstances, sometimes through his own fault. Even so, no matter how much he’s a fool, you don’t want anything really bad happen to him.

I tired of “Zeke” after awhile and called him “Buddy” for a time. Knowing little about Christianity, I had a devil of a time figuring out what kind of Christian he was. I visited a few denominations in San Francisco to get some clues, but came away with little. I read books by Jerry Falwell and Dinesh D’Souza in an attempt to see the world through his eyes.

There was also the problem with the money. By the time I started writing Now Speaks the Devil, Finders Keepers policy had ended. Now “Buddy” would have to keep the money and keep it a secret. This was a positive development. Now the story moved faster.

Further, as the members of the workshop I attended (conducted by James N. “Not the Author of A Million Little Pieces” Frey) pointed out, $10,000 was not enough money. The stakes would have to be raised. Ten thousand ballooned to two million.

In my first drafts, “Buddy” was a stiff-necked barking Fundamentalist. This did not go over well at all—rightly so. Readers were cheering too much for Thornton.

Though the criticism was right, I resisted it strongly, not just because I hated the Fundies (who were reaching their peak of national power then), but because I wanted to avoid making him a wan goody-two shoes. If I took that aspect out of him, I’d have to replace it with something else. What, I had no idea.

There were also tone problems. I was blanketed by the angry shadow of Sam Peckinpah at the time, giving the script a grim punchy tone that clashed badly with the inherent dark humor of the situation and my own strong comic instincts.

At the same time, I didn’t want a broad slapstick comedy. (That I’d take care of with Whackers.) Combining comedy with suspense requires careful stirring. Too much intensity in the suspense kills the humor while too much humor—or arch Po-mo campiness—can kill suspense. Young Frankenstein is hilarious, but it’s neither scary nor suspenseful. And Sam Peckinpah had only a minor touch for humor.

THE UGLY TIME

During the mid-1980s, feces started hitting my fan (some of it thrown by me). I became essentially homeless, sleeping on couches, living in hotels. “I get you,” one acquaintance put it. “Can’t cross the street without getting intercoursed.”

I wrote little during this time. Still I kept nudging at The Way (a title I didn’t like, and I bet you don’t either). At one point, I lost an entire draft off a large floppy disk. I was in another writer’s group, one I didn’t fit in with. (I have “fitting in” issues, as you may notice.)

One thing the group didn’t like about “Buddy” was his “weakness and ineffectuality.” He wasn’t “hero” enough. He had no weapons of his own with which fight Thornton, though I’d woven in a couple of supporting characters as allies (and who still remain, rough and charming). I was urged to refashion “Buddy” into an ex-Green Beret, armed with martial arts and automatic weapons: A Schwarzenegger vehicle in other words. Maybe they could attach Stallone. And then….

They’d nailed the problem, but not the solution. I could not imagine any war veteran acting so naively. And if he wasn’t naïve, then he’d be a criminal himself. By this point, my central theme—the loss of innocence—was pretty well baked in. Turning Buddy into an action toy would lead to an entirely different movie, a standard good vs. evil flick, rather than the good and evil story I wanted to tell, a very different proposition and a movie I wouldn’t be particularly interested in seeing, much less writing.

Finally, an idea bubbled up, inspiration unknown: What if “Buddy” were an amateur magician and toy shop proprietor? Now he’d have some skills and weapons to use against Thornton. Unconventional weapons, sure, but weapons just the same, clever ones, that reflected his character. That one decision further inspired a research visit to a Great America Park, near San Jose. There, I found my “Mt. Rushmore” climax.

One more Hitchcock truism to keep in mind: Imagination is more important than logic.

I was also finding the right tone between humor and serious suspense. The theme deepened and clarified, this story of a man clinging to childhood innocence far past the borders of wisdom. He was a character out of 1950s sitcoms, such as Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet or My Three Sons, living a blinkered life, siloed off from the rest of the world, fighting against the stream of time.

From that last show listed above, I lifted a new name for my protagonist: Chip.

CALM SEAS, QUIET HARBOR

In late 1990, I landed safely in an apartment in the Haight. Life settled down. I bought my first computer (using Wordstar). I sent a draft of the script to former magician, now noted stage hypnotist, John-Ivan Palmer for some tips on stage magic.

One day I was kicking around my desk, searching for a new title. I disliked The Way for that weak consonant and lack of relevance. My thoughts were also wandering around Thornton. I found it unnerving that such an evil man seemed to also to be some weird moral force—as though I were “giving the devil his due.”

… The Devil’s Due . . . now there’s a title! A brief search revealed it had been used only once, in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Titles are not copyrightable and there was remote chance of confusing the marketplace.

The Devil’s Due: not just a good title, but a great title—neatly alliterative, three words that said everything about this script.

If only I could have kept it….

ENTER THE ACTORS

One of my roommates at the time was a San Francisco actor named Michael Anduz. He loved the script, calling it “European” in outlook. He had a point: The script is ironic, humorous, and unsentimental, expressing, I think, a rather stern morality.

Michael was eager to play Thornton. He brought in a colleague, Claudia Rosa, and together they also acted out a couple of scenes with Chip and Ruth, his wife. It kept getting better.

Finally, Michael and Claudia talked me into having a bunch of actors from their theatrical troupe over to read it through. (I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve forgotten the troupe’s name. Michael and Claudia, if you read this….). The reading was a banging success—readers and audience gasped and shuddered; they laughed, they booed Thornton and cheered and applauded when he met his spectacular end. Grins all around.

At least, I had the blueprint for a good movie.

TO THE MARKETPLACE

And so, I sent The Devil’s Due out across the street, to the screenwriting marketplace, sending many dozens of query letters to agents, producers, and workshops, using the following high-concept pitch:

“The Most Naïve Man in the World finds $2 million in drug money in his garbage can. The Most Evil Bad Guy in the Universe wants it back. Or: Ozzie Nelson meets Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone!”

Letters and scripts poured out, rejections poured back in. Many of the agents and other readers—a couple of them high up the ladder—enjoyed it, but as with much of my work, criticism ran the gamut: I was either standing up or sitting down too much; or turning left or turning right. For some, it wasn’t “political” enough. For others too “political.” And some of course, wanted an easy “good vs. evil” movie, not a cautionary moral tale.

Finally, though, like all my work, no matter how carefully crafted and pitched, The Devil’s Due failed to smell of money. And without that, where Hollywood’s concerned, ya got nothin’.

In that matter, I was as innocent as Chip. The days of producing a movie just because it would be good and provide satisfaction to its producers and a smart decent-sized audience, had long gone. (As one producer, recently quoted in The New Yorker, put it, “Don’t send me anything good.”) “Little thrillers” like this are far beyond the capacity of the giants in Hollywood nowadays, with no improvement in sight.

I kept writing screenplays through the 1990s. They mostly got better. But I grew older, too old to be taken seriously by the mighty and youth-obsessed. Unfair, unjust, unwise, unartistic. But that’s how it is.

THE DEVIL IN SUNLIGHT

The Devil’s Due slept in the drawer for over twenty years. Now, thanks to the revolution in publishing, I can put it in the spotlight for you, at least as an e-book.

As with the last two scripts I published, Whackers and The Uglies, I am, once again, ruining my Hollywood career!

What Hollywood career? I was old news a dozen years ago and they don’t read old news down south. From my view, Hollywood has become so Stalinist, agents have to fill out a release to read a menu. They sure won’t download an independently published script.

It will never be bought, never be produced, never light up a darkened theater or living room; just the inside of your head. This is a good thing actually, in that it enables me to break away a little bit from standard screenwriting rules to make it more readable for you non-screenwriting folks.

One unwanted change was forced upon me—the title. In 2015, a minus-budget horror movie called The Devil’s Due escaped to theaters. (One of those movies where, if they paid me to see it, I’d buy a ticket to another movie instead.)

Though that Devil sank like a stone, I took no chances. I’ve had severe problems with The Uglies being confused with a popular series of dystopian YA novels with nearly the same title by Scott Westerfield. With an assist from my wife, Elizabeth, I found a new title: Now Speaks the Devil, a good one (but Lord, I miss the old one!)

All of the original cast who acted out the movie on the screen of my skull have either passed on or aged now. Mr. Van Cleef and the great Alan Rickman are gone; and Jack Nicholson’s a little long-toothed. Right now, that brand of easy confident villainy, whose ancestry also includes Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains and Zachery Scott, seems out of fashion. One current actor who could capture Thornton’s fatal glamour and power is Hugh Laurie. I like to think actors would be lining up around the block to audition to play Thornton.

For Chip—a more challenging role—the dream of Robert Redford or Rick Moranis has also gone gray. Matt Damon, or someone like him, bouncing with youthful charm and breathless innocence, would do a great job.

In the years since, my outlook on life has changed a bit. Even so, Now Speaks the Devil still glows and sparkles, bristling with noirish charm and hair-raising thrills. It deserves the sharp-eyed audience of sophisticated thriller fans I’m always aiming for.

Whatever the “issues” in this sophomore effort, you’ll have a good time (even if it is a screenplay). It’s not perfect, but perfection is a mug’s game anyway. As Chip Adams himself has to learn.

And now, it’s time for the Devil to speak.

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Burchfield

Cover of Now Speaks the Devil by Cathi Stevenson/Bookcover Express; images by Adobe

Photo of Lee Van Cleef taken from ign.com.

Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up, will be published by Ambler House later this Fall 2016. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in 2012. Burchfield is also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The Uglies, and Now Speaks the Devil (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon and other online retailers. You can also find his work at Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, and Scribed. Another script, Dracula: King of Nightmares, inspired by the Bram Stoker classic, will also be out later this year. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, reads at Goodreads and enjoys a few beers at his neighborhood tavern. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Unfinished Business # 11: One-handed, One-man Band

[This first appeared as a guest blog on Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer. It has been edited some. Many thanks to Joel for permission to repost this.]

Getting It Published

For those of you visiting for the first time, it happened like this: in December 2005, I began writing my debut novel Dragon’s Ark. In June 2009, I finally typed “THE END.” I then spent a year in grim pursuit of literary agents, knowing that, even if successful, my novel would likely not come out until 2012, or even later.

By April 2010, I’d nearly drained the well of available literary agents. During that month, I showed up at an independent publishing workshop, held at the Commonwealth Club of California, where Joel Friedlander, host of The BookDesigner, spoke. Nearly a year later, Dragon’s Ark is available to one and all, in paperback and e-book.

The path has been challenging but reasonably, even remarkably, smooth. The end result, the book itself, a POD edition printed through Lightning Source, is a lovely production, especially for an independent paperback from a shoestring company. The most stunning surprise was the cover by Cathi Stevenson of Book Cover Express, who fully grasped my intentions and delivered.

I encountered further success and encouragement with Joel’s excellent interior design, plus his kindness and insight (and, most significantly, patience), all based on his years in the publishing business. Long before any of us, Joel saw the new world coming and entered it fully, then turned and opened its door wide. If you’re starting there, you’re starting well.

Add to that some excellent blurbs from important writers such as David Corbett, Don Herron, and John-Ivan Palmer, and I wound up with a book with excellent literary and commercial potential.

The only major stumble was in the final editing, but even so, amazingly few embarrassments remain (though each one burns like a hot needle in my heart). For a rank beginner, I dropped surprisingly few stitches.

I named my imprint Ambler House Publishing, both after the pioneering genre writer Eric Ambler, and because the name evokes the era of publishing before conglomeration, when Alfred E. Knopf was an actual person who loved books more than he did a 15-percent profit margin. (That era may be returning in new form, but that’s a discussion for later).

Now I had the book. Next, I had to get it out into the world: market it, distribute it, sell it. That train rolls on, and miles and miles of track lies ahead.

Getting It Out There

One of my first marketing/distribution fantasies had me driving all over the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, persuading bookstores to stock Dragon’s Ark. However, just getting to the stores in my own neighborhood was daunting enough. Here, I’ve been reasonably successful. Not every store said yes, but the ones who placed it on their shelves sold all of them . . . mostly likely because I snacked on the ear of everyone I met at my local watering holes, waving my postcards and copies of the book in their faces. (One customer was a hollering drunk whom, I swear, forgot he ever bought it.) I’ve actually sold 10 copies out of my own bag so far.

As for the hundred or so bookstores to whom I sent marketing e-mails—mostly silence. One bookstore invited me to do a “meet and greet” but seems to have forgotten all about me, despite repeated e-mail follow-ups. One lucky break: Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, now offers Dragon’s Ark online, though I’m not sure who to credit for that. After a few scolding e-mail responses from others, I’ve pulled my lowered my cannon a little on that front of my campaign.

Add to that a couple of mixed reviews. I worked hard pursuing these, but they turned out not be enthused about my eccentric approach to the Dracula myth. Lesson learned here: there’s a howling black chasm between fans of Stephanie Wright and fans of, say, Peter Straub. Search for and pick your audience carefully, especially if your book is a little more offbeat than what some folks are used to and expect.

Sales so far have been few, for both paperback and e-book. But instead of folding in despair, I drive on. Like it or not, this will take some time. When Joel announced that he was taking the “soft release” approach to the release of his own new book A Self-Publisher’s Companion, I took the cue: play to my strengths—the audience I already have on my three websites--and build from there.

The Inkspot Approach

I’ve been online for years and have built a small but loyal following. So, instead of trying to fly to the moon on my handsome, but tinny, jalopy, I’ve decided to keep working on the 400 to 500 or so weekly readers here on Earth and grow out from there, one or two readers at a time. (In counterinsurgency work, this is called the “Inkspot Approach.”)

The best way for Ambler House to sell more books is to publish more of them. Just last month, the company published the first in a backlog of Burchfieldiana—the comic screenplay Whackers. Over the next year, more will appear: three other screenplays, plus short, low-priced collections of humor pieces, critical, personal, and travel essays, and a smattering of short stories.

These will be available exclusively as e-books and all will be available at the low price of $1.99. Judging from this article by Laura Miller on Salon,  the 99-cent price recommended for most independent books may not work anymore, thanks to the spamsters who have been hijacking the KindlePad platforms with 99-cent ripoffs and knockoffs of other people’s books, including yours, mine, and the classics. “99 cents” seems to becoming shorthand for “spam.”

But that’s just another kink in the always-evolving world of independent publishing. Here, only the persistent, the patient, and the flexible survive; only they can hope to prosper.

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by Author

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark is available right NOW, published by Ambler House Publishing. It can be ordered in both paperback and e-book editions through your local independent bookstore, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble,  Powell's Books, Smashwords, and Scrib'd. His original comic screenplay Whackers  is now available in a Kindle editon, also from Ambler House. Other material can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. And if you're still not tired of him, he can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.

Unfinished Business #7: Praying for a Flood

A couple of weeks ago, I sent the final files for my ripping horror yarn Dragon’s Ark into Lightning Source/Ingram: Its short, sometimes pot-holed road to publication was reaching its terminus. I received my first copy at the end of March. It’s a lovely cover as you can see—or at least lovely in the Gothic sense: stark, hypnotic, forceful, brilliant.

In the run-up during the weeks before, Joel Friedlander, my interior designer, suggested planting a few words from one of the blurbs I’ve received on the front page, under my byline. I selected some of David Corbett’s kind and excellent words, but when I presented it to cover designer Cathi Stevenson, she couldn’t make them fit. Nor, I decided, would they have fit well higher up the cover because they might have distracted from the “Dragon’s” cruel, compelling stare. I love it as it is, how he grabs the eyes, unapologetic in his ruthless intelligence and ferocity, a character out of classic horror fiction. Like I always imagined Dracula would be.

I imagine bookstore customers coming upon it. They freeze suddenly, sunk into dumb hypnosis. They then marching stiffly over to the cashier: “Must . . . buy  . . . Dragon’s Ark . . .  mmm . . .  no . . .  buy TEN . . . copies . . . Dragon’s Ark.”

On March 31, I sent my approval for Dragon’s Ark to be released.

April 26, 2011, I thought. That day draws closer.  Plans started to congeal for the week leading up to that date. I ordered 22 copies from Ingram (my credit card screamed as its flesh was torn once again), ten of which will be for sale at my first public reading on Sunday, April 17; the rest for individual sales and gifts.

I suppose I should have waited awhile. The next day, April 1, 2010, my email box displayed a Facebook message from lovely FB friend Janna Shoemaker:

“I ORDERED your book Dragon's Ark from Amazon, I should be getting it in a week!! I CANT WAIT TO READ IT :D Thanks ! ;).”

I stammered out a reply, something along the lines of: er, um, really wasn’t intending on releasing it now you know. I was kinda gonna wait . . . .

And then I sighed . . . Oh, the hell with it . . . Let's go! as Pike Bishop says in The Wild Bunch.

You can buy Dragon’s Ark right now at your local bookstore (the ethical preferred method), or you can order it here at the non-taxpaying corporation called Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, or you can wait a couple weeks until it’s ready for the KindleNookPad.

Since then, I’ve found two text errors. I won’t tell you what they are. For those who collect ephemera such as print and continuity errors in books, you’ll have to go out and buy a copy. (People do this with movies—even great ones—so I imagine they do it with books, too. A challenging exercise in detective work, not necessarily hostile.)

I’ll find more errors. Maybe some of you will tell me yourselves. However the news comes, it’s best not to think about it now, even though I know that there will be readers who throw books into the trash the second a comma slips or an unzipped modifier shows the slightest dangle.

I will receive bad reviews. I will also receive positive reviews. And I will receive views that are negative, but interested and thoughtful and speaking with a sound, quiet voice—“Nice try, Burchfield, but here’s where you went wrong.” I look forward to those. You have to step around in front of your ego if you want to be good at what you do.

As for persnickety Amazon flatheads, like John Waters’ Serial Mom, they only want to stick their scissors in someone, it doesn’t matter who, or why. The sticking of the scissors, the knowledge that they’re causing pain, that’s the thing. They’ve been with us since the dawn of consciousness, through the Hill at Calvary, through the last awful century and into this one. There’s no point in writing for them. It’s one of the things I hate most about the Internet. Sometimes I think the web is nothing but a chorus of psychopaths, drowning out the best voices among us.

And there will also be able to who simply “don’t like this kind of thing,” whether because it’s genre fiction or horror fiction. Or maybe they think I “should be writing something else.” Nothing I can do about them, either. No book has ever pleased everyone. Dragon’s Ark will definitely be no exception.

Whatever happens, I’m not waiting to shoot up the bestseller lists. I won’t even check my sales figures for a little while. It’ll be drips and trickles at first, maybe for quite along time to come. But I’ll praying for a flood.

No, I’m not Alfred A. Knopf. (Hell, even they’re not Alfred E. Knopf anymore). Instead, let’s pretend it’s 1957 and I’m Roger Corman—a hero to scrappy talented independent artists everywhere--trying to make the best movie I can on only a dime. Maybe the editing’s a tad choppy, the dialogue flat, the camerawork shaky . . .

. . .  but darn aren’t we having fun . . . ?

Or, I hope, aren’t you having fun?

Dragon’s Ark: Go for it.

(re-edited 4/11/11)

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark  is available right NOW, published by Ambler House Publishing and can be ordered through your local independent bookstore, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and will be available as an e-book by the end of April. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.
 

My Dark Muse: A Boy's Life with Dracula

 

I spent four years writing my novel Dragon’s Ark (due out April 26, available at your local independent bookstore, on Amazon and as an e-book). I’m spending even more sand grains trying to persuade everyone in the English-language reading world to open its creaking castle door.

As I buttonhole my way around town, I occasionally confront the following response:

 ”Dracula? That old thing? Again!? But . . . why?”

With a literary and cultural figure who has been raked over (or staked over) as much as Dracula, it’s a fair question that deserves as thorough an answer as I can give.

Honestly, I wrote Dragon’s Ark not because “vampires are hot right now.” I’d have written this book, Twilight, True Blood, or no. I don’t read much vampire fiction and, frankly, vampire hotness is a marketplace fluke I could have done without. It forces me to shout even louder with a tale that already storms through the mountain tops as it is.

Anyway, Dragon’s Ark is not a “vampire novel.” It’s a “Dracula novel,” to me a distinct entity, a singularity, a specific mythic personality that symbolizes a stark stain in the human psyche, an unpleasant unsettling idea about ourselves. It’s been digging itself out of my graveyard of nightmares for a long time.

And at last, in Dragon’s Ark, he is free.

When I was a kid in the early 1960s, the other boys wanted to grow up to be spacemen or cowboys, teachers or doctors, baseball or football players. Not me! I wanted to be Dracula! Not George Reeves as Superman in his fruity underpants and cape. I wanted to the original Man in Black. The King of Nightmares. The Superman of Evil.

I’ve loved Dracula from the moment I saw Bela Lugosi glide with his peculiar majesty down that cobwebbed castle staircase in the 1931 film version. Such grace and power! The air split in two before him as his words sang with peculiar, ethereal music: “The blood is the life, Mis-ter Renfield!” his
voice pouring down on wide-eyed Dwight Frye like poisoned syrup, his eyes blazing with a command you encounter only in the dark, a “morally fatal glamor” as Peter Straub puts it in his masterwork Ghost Story. 

“Listen to them! Children of the night! What music they make!” I love the implication burbling behind Lugosi’s interpretation here: how can mere mortal music compare to the moonlight song of wolves calling from a faraway land? Call of the wild, indeed!

I first saw Dracula on a weekday: “Movie of the Week” on WOR-TV Channel 9, one of my favorite channels. I must have been seven or eight. Of significance to Freudians, my father, a distinctly unpleasant man, had left several years before, though his shadow still hung like angry smoke in the fine old house down Red Mill Road. Everyone could smell the burned bridges.

A Freudian might say someone—or Some Thing heh-heh-heh--had to fill the parental vacuum. But I believe my response to Dracula was much more elemental than the cliché of absent fathers.

Anyway, I was a little boy, incapable of such insight. To me Dracula’s greatness—it struck like black lightning—lay in his freedom and his power.

Think about it: Dracula gets to stay up all night. He lives free in a world that never says “no,” a world without parents, bullies at home and school, teachers, police, government, or any of the rules that make the human world the fleshy rational prison it is.

And, most magical of all, Dracula controls the elements, down to the subatomic particles of his body. He can reform, shape-shift at will into a bat, a wolf and . . . Gee whiz, my young psyche whirled. Why stop at bats and wolves? What else can he do? If only I had such power!

He’s insolent toward the laws of physics and all humans freeze and tremble under his stare! He rules every living thing that passes by his hidden shadow. No one dares argue with him. If I were Dracula, every single bully at home and at school, would never lay their brutish hands on me again. They’d be my slaves or be gone in terrible grotesque suffering! By my wish, by my will, they would die! Die I say!

It took awhile to find a copy of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, a Dell/Laurel Leaf paperback for 25 cents from 1965, with Dracula looking like as Stoker described him so well, a bit like Charlton Heston too. I read the book all the way through and it was even better than the movie, which even I sensed was not as good as it should have been, even with Lugosi at its center. (But more about film and literary aesthetics later.)

I cast my own shadow as Young Dracula around the schoolyard at George Washington Elementary in Mohegan Lake and, later on, at Lakeland Middle School in nearby Cortlandt. I knew everything about all the other monsters in Universal Studio’s great pantheon of wonderfully impossible creatures: the Frankenstein Monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy. But the Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man were
victims, unable to help who they were. Dracula chose his life, and so became their Lord and Master.

With much pleading, I persuaded my poor mother to buy me a subscription to Forrest J. Ackerman’s “Famous Monsters of Filmland” magazine. I even found a board game of “Dracula” (Object: escape from his castle, forgotten now, even on the Internet). 

The other kids, I’m sure, grew fairly sick of my monster obsession. The teachers worried about my taste for “blood-and-thunder,” as one put it. It became something of a joke. One afternoon, a kid named Christopher Ryan slipped and fell off the gym bleachers at Lakeland Middle School during a mild recess rumpus. As a teacher pulled Chris to his feet, he pointed at me: “He made me fall! He stared at me like Dracula!”

Ah . . . such Power wielded so shamelessly! It is, indeed, a good thing that children do not rule the world . . . or don't they?

As for the sexual implications underlying Dracula, that realization only came later and—unusually for me—I shrugged it off. As I grew older my ambitions to be a Sociopath with Supernatural Powers, or any kind of full-bore criminality, faded away, to be replaced with the prosaic, pragmatic liberalism
that marks my thinking now.

But still, the dream of Dracula remained alive, a shadow in shadows, especially when, in real life, I encountered similar individuals, mostly male, but all with one thing in common: a casual drive to dominate, to exploit, who often spoke glibly of freedom, but only cared for their own. I found them in the history books, in the news, and, sometimes, walking by my side, intelligent, calculating, charming, compelling but deadly to body and soul.

For me, Dracula has always been about freedom without attachment, power without responsibility, action without consequence, life without end, tempting things all, especially for the human male. I try to stir this theme to the surface of the blood-rich pool of Dragon’s Ark, something that I don’t
think any adaptation, film or fiction, has ever caught fully. In this book, I'm not digging up suppressed sexuality, drug addiction or moony teenage passion, but the craving for eternal life, absolute freedom and transcendent power.

In Dragon’s Ark, Dracula wants more than our blood.

For him, liberty and license are one and indistinguishable. The individual is all, inviolate and untouchable. He’s a Demon God who cheerfully thumbs his nose at an indifferent Universe, or scorns its oppressive Creator (against Whom he is a negative image, a bitter irony); a sociopathic terrorist who mocks whimpering, cowardly humanity; a vicious prankster who torments his enemies to insanity with cruel bizarre tricks while feeding off the dozing human cattle as though we were fuel dumps, happiest when the world is darkest.

As for the rest of us well, if we ain’t got it, too bad, bubs (though we may certainly and secretly envy him). The world I created in Dragon’s Ark is Dracula’s world. We just live in it, with, at best, only a dim awareness of our enslavement; a fascist/authoritarian dream for a certain kind of faux libertarian maybe, but a nightmare for everyone else.

Dragon’s Ark is also a love letter, if you will, to a fabulous legend, to a grand but deadly myth conjured from ancient myth, civilized history, and the childhood fantasies of one little boy. He’s a force of both nature and of our unexplainable selves, here, I hope, seen through a prism of a moral curiosity that is often absent from the fantasy lives of boys and always from the moral insanity that marks terrorists and tyrants alike.

(To be continued)


Photo by Author

Copyright 2011 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield's contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark will be published April 26 by Ambler House Publishing and can be ordered through your local independent bookstore, through Amazon and as an e-book. Other essays and postings can also be read at The Red Room website for writers. He can also be friended on Facebook, tweeted at on Twitter and e-mailed at tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net.