Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People

Paul Woods & Gavin Baddeley
Vlad the Impaler: Son of the Devil, Hero of the People (2010)
It's taken me an entire decade to get around to reading this one and for numerous reasons, the main one being that I've known Paul - the author, or one of the authors, I guess - for nearly thirty years and distinctly remember a phone call ending with I'll have to go now, Lawrence, I've got to translate this incoherent piece of shit into readable English before the weekend. I think he was referring to Gavin Baddeley's Lucifer Rising which he'd been given the task of editing for Plexus Books, which didn't instill me with much confidence in their subsequent collaboration.

For what it may be worth, I'm also a contributor. Specifically Paul phoned me back when he was putting the book together asking for a painting of bodies impaled on stakes, mainly because, as he described it, visual material relating to Vlad the Impaler was a bit thin on the ground. It seemed an odd request, but I did what I could and was paid for it, although I'm still not that convinced by the thing I came up with. Nevertheless I'm thanked in the front of the book, and in fact I'm thanked within the same sentence as Boyd Rice. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that but I'm probably about due for cancellation anyway, so I don't suppose it matters.

Online criticisms include one particularly peculiar accusation of homophobia which I can only assume must refer to descriptions of sodomy given without any attendant suggestion of it being a powerful and inspiring challenge to gender stereotypes; and a general whine of discontent about a lack of academic rigour evinced by a haphazard citation of sources. The second of these is true in so much as that this is arguably a populist dissertation, but it seems a little unfair given the scarcity of source material regarding the historical Vlad Dracula necessitating a speculative approach, and that this book is as much about the subsequent myth and our interpretation of the same. Certain speculative passages are written as fictionalised accounts, striking an initially odd note akin to a written equivalent of those bloody awful historical television documentaries which pepper the narrative with scenes of underpaid actors hopping about, pretending to be Shakespeare or to have invented fire or whatever; but the scenes are well written - probably by Paul, I suspect - if gruesome, and surely serve to communicate the visceral power of the mythology under discussion better than would any more sober description. This seems to matter because, I would argue, I think this subject needs to be communicated in terms which may upset the reader in order for us to fully understand it. So, one might term the book a personal vision in the sense of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, which would have amounted to little more than a list of names and dates without the stewardship of its author.

Another criticism I've noticed has been the narrative's tendency to digress, to flit off elsewhere with discussion of Al Capone, Ian Brady, de Sade or whoever for the sake of comparison, which - true enough - would be a distraction in something more academic, but which I believe serves this sort of discussion very well. The epilogue details the mythic appeal of Dracula in the field of black metal and similarly unlistenable genres, which admittedly seems a bit surplus to requirements; and additionally asks the aforementioned Boyd Rice what he thinks, and what he thinks is unfortunately quite interesting and perceptive, which is yet another argument I am absolutely not having ever again - but otherwise it all hangs together beautifully, I'd say. It may even be that digressions made for the sake of comparison somewhat alleviate the potentially overwhelming parade of wooden stakes going up arses, page after page after page.

Vlad Dracula was a minor regent in a part of the world which has been absolutely central to the history of human civilisation up until recent times, and Woods does a great job of impressing upon the reader that Western Europe was very much an obscure fringe concern for most of this story, which itself maps most of why we're here today, culturally speaking; and Vlad Dracula was a fascinating, thoroughly brutal figure, yet by no means the worst of his cultural sphere, and who probably wouldn't have generated quite so strong a legend without some potentially redeeming features - or at least redeeming in the context of fifteen century Wallachia. This book, which is nothing if not thorough in examining its subject from every conceivable angle, explains the appeal of the myth in such convincing detail that I almost want to give Bram Stoker's dreary novel another read.