What a splendid subject to sink one's teeth into, raved the iWashington Posti. Here was a six-foot-two Irishman with a red beard--a Victorian family man, a spirited debater, and the author of novels and short stories largely forgotten today. All, of course, except for iDraculai, which has enjoyed countless stage and screen incarnations and haunted the dreams of many generations. Bram Stoker lived at the very center of late-Victorian social and artistic life and numbered among his friends Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, James Whistler, William Gladstone, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. But it was his relationship with the mesmerizing, domineering actor Henry Irving that may have played the most crucial role in Stoker's life--a real-life monster who ultimately led to Stoker's most famous creation. In this book that the iBaltimore Suni called superb, Barbara Belford draws on unpublished archival material to reveal the links between the reticent author's life, his