Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary CountDracula, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in a psychological and culturalportrait, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of thewriter who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was inexplicably paralyzed as aboy, and his story unfolds against a backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors:cholera and famine fever, childhood opium abuse, frantic bloodletting, mesmericquack cures, and the gnawing obsession with “bad blood” that inform every page ofDracula. Stoker’s ambiguous sexuality is explored through his lifelong acquaintancewith Oscar Wilde, who emerges as Stoker’s repressed shadow self—a doppelgängerworthy of a Gothic novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker’s passionate youthfulcorrespondence with Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic, and his slavish adorationof the actor Sir Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.