INCARNADINE: The True Memoirs of Count Dracula

RH Greene's New Orson Welles Radio Documentary AIRBORNE: A LIFE IN RADIO WITH ORSON WELLES

2011-10-30T16:20:00.000-07:00

INCARNADINE novelist R. H. Greene has just completed a groundbreaking radio documentary on one of his artistic passions: the late, great Orson Welles. AIRBORNE: A LIFE IN RADIO WITH ORSON WELLES represents the fruit of over a decade of research, and is the first biographical documentary ever to offer a complete overview of Welles' vast American radio career. The extended "director's cut" of AIRBORNE can be heard here. Greene's statement to readers of this blog follows.

Folks --

I know this blog is dedicated to my "Memoirs of Dracula" project, but over time it has evolved into a sharing space for other activities as well. Chief among these have been my various documentary projects for public radio, including the feature-length VAMPIRA AND ME, first aired last Halloween.

That holiday seems to be a good one for Dracula novelists, because this year I've managed to air another of my dream projects: AIRBORNE: A LIFE IN RADIO WITH ORSON WELLES, the first comprehensive documentary ever created about the fascinating totality of Orson Welles' American radio career.

Many people know of Welles' notorious WAR OF THE WORLDS radio hoax--a sonic masterpiece so potent it's still aired on radio stations all over America each Halloween. Others know Welles played THE SHADOW on radio for a season, and that it made him a national star.

These signature achievements, noteworthy as they are, are the tip of the iceberg. In fact, Welles made over 500 radio broadcasts, frequently using radio the way an artist uses a sketchbook, or a novelist a journal. He gave his all in a variety of unlikely contexts, making serious attempts at careers as a radio comedian, a wartime propagandist and a passionate political commentator. It could even be argued that radio, not film, was Welles' primary career. It was certainly the primary source of his celebrity during the CITIZEN KANE era.

I've been an avid collector of Welles radio programs for well over a decade (my interest in him goes back much further, and could be called lifelong). I brought my entire Welles audio collection with me to Bulgaria the last time I went abroad to work on the "Memoirs of Dracula" project. My downtime was spent listening and relistening to Welles' radio work, so that I could become not just passingly familiar with the well over 300 hours of material in my collection, but also able to make deeper connections between what on the surface can seem like a disjointed and hyperactive broadcast career (which it wasn't).

I also hope the program makes a few unique points, including the heretofore unremarked influence of Bram Stoker and DRACULA on Welles' WAR OF THE WORLDS broadcast, and that it shines a light on several important overlooked works.

What hopefully emerges in AIRBORNE is a unique contribution to Welles scholarship, and a new point of entry to Welles as artist, man and public figure. I also hope the piece provides an accessible pathway for the modern listener into the lost and lively world of "golden age" radio.

Many of the broadcasts the documentary excerpts have not been aired in over 60 years, including the controversial and career-ending series of political broadcasts that both ended Welles' American radio work and sent him out as an unsung and profoundly important early champion of the Civil Rights movement.

The web version of AIRBORNE is fully 50 percent longer than the broadcast version, and while I'm pleased with both, I recommend listening online simply because the Welles broadcast materials are so fascinating, and the web version contains more of them.

For those of you who are waiting eagerly for THE CHARNEL HOUSE, I promise it is complete but for the editing, and that I will get back to work on overseeing the final copy edit at the start of the New Year.

All best,
RHG

A Note on THE CHARNEL HOUSE from R. H. Greene

2011-07-10T09:43:00.000-07:00

I've been receiving a lot of queries from INCARNADINE fans about the publication schedule for THE CHARNEL HOUSE, the second and final volume in the MEMOIRS OF DRACULA project. Please forgive the delay. I am currently directing a documentary feature film and have not been able to dedicate the time to do the final manuscript corrections and editing on CHARNEL HOUSE, as the movie deadlines are in the moment more pressing.

I thank you for your patience and interest, and promise to keep you all posted through this website and via the aggregated blog feature on AMAZON's INCARNADINE page as THE CHARNEL HOUSE moves through its final phases and into print.

All the best, R. H. Greene

RH Greene Profiles New Indie Movie Musical LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR

2011-07-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

Photo: RH Greene (in sunglasses) with the cast of LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR

INCARNADINE author R.H. Greene's latest radio piece for public radio powerhouse KPCC and its OFF-RAMP magazine show profiles LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR, an audacious new low budget indie musical shot on the cheap on the streets of L.A. Extended musical clips from the slamming score by Beyonce' musical director Kimberly Burse and lyricist/screenwriter Glenn Gaylord plus interviews with Gaylord, producer/director Sheldon Larry and breakout star Phillip Evelyn make this a must-listen for indie film freaks, muscial fans or anyone who wants to know what's happening at the outer limits. Enjoy it here.

RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL: Interview with Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs by R. H. Greene

2011-05-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

Horror legends Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs talk to DRACULA novelist R. H. Greene about their 1985 cult classic RE-ANIMATOR, RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL and NEVERMORE: AN EVENING WITH EDGAR ALLAN POE. It's a new "stage" in a legendary horror collaboration stretching back more than 25 years as Gordon and Combs return to their roots in live theatre and emerge with two sellout triumphs. Hear clips from the shows, Stuart Gordon's thoughts on the difference between theatre and film, and Jeffrey Combs' feelings about the musical version of his signature character Dr. Herbert West. It's all right here.

INCARNADINE Comes to Kindle

2011-02-28T08:04:00.000-08:00

We are pleased to announce that a new Kindle edition of INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA has been created under the personal supervision of author R. H. Greene. The INCARNADINE Kindle is available for download for just $4.49. This is a savings of more than 80 percent off the hardcover list price.

"Amazon's new royalty structure for Kindle is a very generous one thanks to competition from the iPad," Greene says. "So we made the decision to pass that generosity along to readers as a thank you for their patience in waiting for this digital edition to be done and done right."

The new Kindle edition includes the complete text of INCARNADINE, "with a few small typographical 'fixes' that came to our attention over time." There's also an interactive menu with hyperlinks between the contents page and each section and chapter of the book; a revised author bio; and one small addition to the "Special Thanks" at book's end: a thank you to reader Kat Courtright, whose Amazon post pleading for an authorized Kindle edition inspired Greene to personally spearhead the project.

The Kindle edition of INCARNADINE is available here.

Invitation to the DANSE: Stephen King's DANSE MACABRE Considered

2011-02-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to read Stephen King's survey of horror DANSE MACABRE for many years but I held off, partly because my enthusiasm for King waned a bit as I grew older and partly because when I set out to write my own revisionist Dracula epic I didn't want literary theory and structural spreadsheets rattling around in my head to compete with the characters--new and familiar--who were trying to find my version of their voices. But King was a seminal reading experience for me as a youngster. My first withdrawal from the public library in my then-hometown of Merrimack, N. H. was a paperback edition of 'SALEM'S LOT, and CARRIE and THE SHINING taught me all about writing in the "streams of consciousness" narrative voice many years before I encountered James Joyce. So in a sense this was a forced encounter with an old friend--sort of like looking up a childhood pal on Facebook--and, as might be expected in such a situation, both an awkward experience and a rewarding one.

Earlier this month, I finally decided to give DANSE MACABRE a test drive, and then inhaled it in about three days. The book reminded me both of what I once loved about Stephen King's writing and what caused me to drift away down the years. This is a work that can best be described with the word "largesse"--it has the same expansive voice and at times sprawling and even wayward structure that seems to have blossomed in King's work around the time he graduated from the great hope of horror fiction to National Institution, which I would date to the publication of THE STAND, the 900 page doorstop of a book subsequently republished at over 1100 pages in an "uncut" edition.

The best metaphor for the voice and structure of DANSE MACABRE is perhaps one floated by the book itself. King talks of the "secret window" at one point, through which the dark visions of the subcutaneous world of night rush in. DANSE MACABRE throws that window open like a burglar with a crowbar, letting in a fair amount of light but also a good deal of wind. At times it feels almost free associative in the way it rambles around its topic; there are digressions within digressions, and even some rather startling factual errors, as when King talks about the terrifying plot twists inside Walt Disney's BAMBI and mistakenly kills off Bambi's father by gunshot, leaving his mother to participate in the epic forest fire finale long after she's been slain by Disney's faceless hunters.

The approach does make space for some intriguing autobiographical passages, a few offering revelations about King's fiction he himself seems only partly aware of. The Manichean simplicities of the old EC horror comics from the 50s stand revealed as perhaps the pivotal influence on King's own work, and he transplants his love of them onto the whole horror genre by consistently insisting on its fundamental conservatism--its desire to restore order and punish the wicked.

I think this begs an important question about what we go to horror stories for, and also judges them almost entirely by their (usually restorative) endings. After reading DRACULA, do we retain the details of Stoker's rushed and rather unsatisfying finale, where Dracula is actually vanquished by a Bowie knife rather than the popularly accepted stake through the heart? Or does our mind linger over the titillatingly unwholesome and transgressive sexual content--the seduction scenes, the symbolic rapes of Harker, Lucy and Mina? Why did audiences consistently cheer for Freddy, Jason and Chucky, transforming them into the "heroes" of their respective movie franchises? Who do we root for in the final reel--Kong or the airplanes?

King's discussions of iconic works like Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, Stoker's DRACULA and Stevenson's DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE feel a bit tossed off and obligatory (he's especially weak on FRANKENSTEIN, never even acknowledging the popular conception of its central myth as being one of humanity beset by that which it creates, even though there's a fair amount of pagespace devoted to that theme when he gets to the atomic paranoia films of his own childhood in the 1950s). I was quite charmed, though, by his identification of HYDE as literature's archetypal "werewolf" story--a novel interpretation that seems to me to be quite illuminating, original, and correct, and symptomatic of the flexible imagination at work inside these pages.

King affirms his status as what I would call a "blue collar intellectual"--someone raised on pop culture and unwilling to cede an inch to what he sees as a shadowy and highfalutin' critical establishment when it comes to the profundity and importance of the various junk culture sources that moved him as a child and suckled him as an artist. There's a surprisingly consistent and somewhat unattractive anti-intellectualism percolating in these pages. Critics, scholars, graduate students, professors, and even those aspiring writers King sees as simpleminded enough to believe writing can be learned and taught, appear in King's crosshairs again and again. As a result, there's actually precious little to be gleaned from DANSE MACABRE that seems to me to be really useful to the novice writer. This is more a book for the horror consumer seeking to educate him or herself on one noted practitioner's tastes and proclivities--his sense of his own tradition.

The Fieldingesque voice, which frequently addresses the reader directly, is charming and consistently modest, and startlingly fine writing materializes in unexpected places. King, who was a young father when he wrote this book, is especially insightful in his descriptions of the childhood mind--its openness to the astonishing, its indiscriminate curiosity, its constant alternation between terror and wonder. He also proves himself a loyal but clear-eyed friend, celebrating his literary peers Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch and Harlan Ellison in vivid and literate portraits that acknowledge their massive contributions to horror, sci-fi and fantasy, while also seeing their reputations as strong and secure enough to withstand a bit of constructive criticism.

As literary analysis, DANSE MACABRE is probably a bit too diffuse and idiosyncratic to stand as anything much more than a highly quotable oddity. But taken either as a revealing autobiographical glimpse into the mind and processes of one of the titans of contemporary horror literature, or as the spiritual diary of an archetypal "monster boomer," it's expansive, at times instructive, and frequently a massively entertaining read.

--RHG
April 18, 2011

Freaky FRIDAY: A Frankenstein Story

2011-02-10T05:40:00.000-08:00

In his latest commentary for public radio station KPCC 89.3-FM in Los Angeles, RH Greene takes a different approach to Rebecca Black's FRIDAY--the viral music phenomenon. FRIDAY mastermind Patrice Wilson takes on the haters with a song of his own, reports of legal tussles swirl around Ark Music Factory, and youkoolaylee00 drops the definitive emo version, featured below. The radio story can be heard here.

Who is "VOLUPTUA?" Revisit a 1950s TV sex scandal with RH Greene

2011-02-09T20:43:00.000-08:00

Who is "Voluptua?" In his latest broadcast documentary for public radio powerhouse KPCC, INCARNADINE author RH Greene profiles Gloria Pall, an "it" girl from the 1950s who worked with everyone from Abbot and Costello to Elvis Presley.

Pall's career took a scandalous turn in 1954 when she began appearing as "Voluptua," a sexy TV show hostess on LA-based KABC-TV. Voluptua pushed sexual boundaries way past the accepted norms, and a culture war resulted, with Pall denounced as "Corruptua" from pulpits throughout California. In "Voluptua: The Love Goddess," Gloria Pall reminisces about her days as a "bad girl," and re-enacts her most notorious role. You can hear it all right here.

Corman's World at Sundance Featuring Footage by RH Greene

2011-01-29T09:42:00.000-08:00

Photo: R. H. Greene at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival

The documentary feature CORMAN'S WORLD: EXPLOITS OF A HOLLYWOOD REBEL just premiered at Sundance and it features footage of Roger Corman directed by INCARNADINE author RH Greene. The doc, which tells the story of Roger Corman's career as a pioneer and continuing practitioner of exploitation cinema, contacted Greene early in the filmmaking process for advice about archival resources and to borrow some footage from Greene's classic cult film SCHLOCK! THE SECRET HISTORY OF AMERICAN MOVIES. Greene was on hand at Sundance for the world premiere of CORMAN'S WORLD, which will be showing on American Movie Classics later in 2011.

The Mazursky Mystery: Radio from RH Greene

2011-01-16T22:33:00.000-08:00

Image: Paul Mazursky (left) and INCARNADINE author RH Greene

INCARNADINE author RH Greene just did a public radio profile of and interview with legendary filmmaker Paul Mazursky for KPCC 89.3 in Los Angeles. The piece aired on both OFF-RAMP, where Greene is a regular contributor, and on NPR's Morning Edition during LA drive time. Have a listen here.

R. H. Greene to Interview Filmmaker Paul Mazursky at LA County Museum of Art

2011-01-04T06:51:00.000-08:00

LOS ANGELES-Legendary filmmaker Paul Mazursky ("Down and Out in Beverly Hills," "An Unmarried Woman") will be honored with a public screening of his Oscar-winning 1974 comedy "Harry and Tonto" at the LA County Museum of Art on Thursday, Jan. 13th at 7:30 pm in LACMA's Leo S. Bing Theater. The screening will be followed by a rare personal appearance by Mazursky to discuss his work and legacy, with the Q and A to be conducted by INCARNADINE author and public radio personality R. H. Greene.

On Saturday, Jan. 15th Mazursky will receive the LA Film Critics Association's Career Achievement Award for his contributions to the art of cinema and his impressive body of work. A profile of Mazursky and radio tribute by R. H. Greene will air on 89.3 KPCC-FM's OFF-RAMP in the Greater Los Angeles area at noon on Saturday, Jan. 8 with a rebroadcast Sunday at 7pm.

Dracula: A Mosaic of Alternative Approaches

2010-12-16T19:23:00.000-08:00

R. H. Greene has created a new list for Amazon of books which, like INCARNADINE, provide different approaches to Bram Stoker's classic text. See why the author of THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA prefers Syrie James to Karen Essex, the "Gospel" of Renfield to Renfield as "Slave of Dracula," plus nods to the scholarly contributions of Sylvia Starshine, Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller. It's all available right here.

Vampira and Me - An Addendum to the Radio Documentary by RH Greene

2010-10-29T17:46:00.000-07:00

(Recently, INCARNADINE author RH Greene was given an entire hour of airtime on LA public radio station KPCC FM 89.3 to present a new radio documentary entitled "Vampira and Me" about the life and cultural importance of his friend, the late Maila Nurmi, aka Vampira.

The experience of sifting through many hours of unpublished audio, video and transcribed interviews with Maila in Greene's collection inspired further thinking about her. Hence what follows.

To listen online to RH Greene's radio documentary "Vampira and Me" or to download a commercial-free mp3 of the full 50 minute broadcast, go here.)

Dana Gould, who was the dearest friend of Maila Nurmi in her declining years and possibly the dearest friend she ever had, mailed me a picture of Maila as Vampira just after she died. It was an outtake from the 1954 LIFE Magazine spread Maila's creation landed after just six weeks on the air--when you keep in mind that LIFE was the highest circulation national magazine of a magazine-mad era and that The Vampira Show was local TV unavailable outside of Greater Los Angeles, you get some idea of the character's explosive impact.

The photo Dana sent instantly became my all time favorite Vampira image, and my favorite picture of Maila. It shows Maila in full Vampira mode, leaning out of the back seat of her trademark black 1932 Packard toward a mother and two daughters who look like they just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting for the Saturday Evening Post.

We can't see the girls' faces, but their body posture indicates hesitation. And no wonder. Because Maila's expression captures something simultaneously true to the character and to the woman who played her: she's utterly baffled by the pretty little tableau of normalcy before her. This affluent trio of females is an alien thing to Maila/Vampira, some horror from another world. A walking nightmare herself, Maila stares at a perfect icon of American middle class bliss as if she's the one having the bad dream.

I think this picture speaks to the fundamental appeal of Maila's Vampira creation, and also to a primary truth of what could be thought of as Maila's tragic but also rather brave life. In the interviews I conducted with her when we were friends back in the 1990s, she made it clear again and again how completely uninterested and even hostile she was to the conformity and largesse that were universal priorities of her era and every era since. "I don't like to do wholesome people," she said to me when describing the inspiration for the giddily unwholesome Vampira. "I don't like to dwell on their very existence, let alone pretend to be one."

In the radio documentary about Maila I just did for public radio, Dana can be heard wishing Maila, who died childless and impoverished, had been surrounded by grandkids in the posh LA suburb of Glendale rather than readily available to latter day fans who became friends like him and me. I think that's a beautiful sentiment, and very reflective of his selfless love for her. In my own way, I share Dana's wish, and at the same time I wonder whether Maila would have been capable of living that way.

Vampira became an enduring icon because she offered a place to stand for all the misfits who hear a stifled scream churning away beneath the smiley face pasted over so much of modern life. And she was empowered to do this by the fact that the woman who created her meant it with every molecule of her being.

The goth kids suiting up this Halloween weekend may not even know whose crest they're wearing when they slip into their black fishnets, cinch their waists and press on their long red fingernails. But the momentary exhilaration they feel--that sense of danger, and the cool breeze of freedom wafting like oxygen though the stale air of the everyday--has been blown to them like a kiss from Maila's ruby red lips. It's a cliche, but freedom isn't free--especially not for the pioneers. In the end, it cost Maila a lot to maintain that stance for so long, but I don't know if there was another one available to her.

She cut a trail so early into such a dense thicket of received wisdom. It's no wonder she never thought to find a way back. I like to think if we could see the faces of the little girls in that fifty year old LIFE magazine outtake, their expressions would not be ones of horror but of dawning realization.

NEWS: Paperback Edition of INCARNADINE Now Available on Amazon!

2010-09-09T14:24:00.000-07:00

The trade paperback edition of INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA has been released just in time for Halloween 2010!

Identical to the hardcover in all respects, the new softcover retails for $19.95, or almost one third off the hardcover list price.

Though the INCARNADINE Kindle is probably still the season's best bargain at $2.99 during the run up to Halloween, the softcover gives readers who want to kick it old school a low-price option.

The INCARNADINE paperback is so new that the listing is a bit primitive, but you can find it on Amazon here.

INCARNADINE Author R. H. Greene's NPR Radio Commentaries

2010-08-06T18:40:00.000-07:00

INCARNADINE author R. H. Greene is now a regular commentator for the weekly radio program OFF-RAMP on the Southern California powerhouse KPCC 89.3, an NPR affiliate.

A new site feature has been added to the INCARNADINE website (http://www.draculamemoirs.blogspot.com) where listeners will find the following archive pieces on their own dedicated page:

• Interview with Author R. H. Greene about INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA. Both the 6-minute radio piece and the full 45 minute interview are included.

• For Baby B. R. H. Greene's tribute to "Baby B," his twin brother, Tom, who passed away before INCARNADINE's publication.

• Eastern European Dreams. Inspiration and rumination in the region where INCARNADINE was both written and is set.

• Six-Pack Abs Made Me a Better Writer! The mysteries of creative potency revealed.

• My Mel Gibson Moment First-person reflections on a superstar's rise and fall.

• The Visible Man A nine-minute documentary on the enduring mystery of a notorious neighborhood eccentric, and art's inadequacy in ever explaining human behavior.

• Vampira and Me A feature-length documentary about RH Greene's odd friendship with goth icon, television pioneer and the star of Ed Wood Jr.'s "Plan Nine from Outer Space:" Maila Nurmi aka Vampira. Extensive rare interview materials from Greene's personal archive are included.

• The Mazursky Mystery An in-depth profile of legendary film director Paul Mazursky by RH Greene.

• Voluptua: The Love Goddess A look back at a forgotten sex scandal that rocked early broadcast TV, featuring 83-year-old former pin-up girl Gloria Pall, aka "Voluptua."

• Freaky Friday A different take on Rebecca Black's FRIDAY--the viral music phenomenon. FRIDAY mastermind Patrice Wilson takes on the haters, reports of legal tussles swirl around Ark Music Factory, and youkoolaylee00 drops the definitive emo version.

• Re-Animated Horror legends Stuart Gordon and Jeffrey Combs talk to DRACULA novelist R. H. Greene about their 1985 cult classic RE-ANIMATOR, RE-ANIMATOR: THE MUSICAL and NEVERMORE: AN EVENING WITH EDGAR ALLAN POE.

• Life's a Drag Profile of LEAVE IT ON THE FLOOR, an audacious new low budget indie musical shot on the cheap on the streets of L.A. Extended dance pop music clips plus interviews with producer/director Sheldon Larry, screenwriter Glenn Gaylord and breakout star Phillip Evelyn.

The "Radio Commentaries" page will be updated regularly.

DRACULA... IN HIS OWN WORDS... (trailer)

2010-05-13T18:56:00.000-07:00

YOU CAN LINK TO THIS VIDEO! Just go here and cut and paste the "embed" html in the upper right portion of the frame into your homepage.

VAMPYRES.COM Reviews INCARNADINE, Says It's A "True Work of Art"

2010-05-13T06:19:00.000-07:00

VAMPYRES ONLY editor Brad Middleton has posted a 5 Star review of INCARNADINE to VAMPYRES.COM under his nom de plume "Vladimir" in which he says the book "reassured [his] faith that there is still room for true works of art within this genre."

Middleton went on to praise INCARNADINE for "challenging my perception of the most iconic character in vampire literature," and for altering his thinking about Bram Stoker's venerable creation. "Dracula," Middleton writes, "is now much more than simply a fiend lurking within the shadows of a crumbling ruin high atop the Carpathian mountains. He's now a fully-realized character; a monster still, but one we now truly understand."

"The author has created an engrossing back-story to Dracula, breathing new life into what had become a tired, one-dimensional character," Middleton concluded "This is the Dracula we never knew; his tale is bittersweet, often philosophical, laced with moments of true happiness and great tragedy...

"The memoir continues in THE CHARNEL HOUSE, a companion volume set to offer Dracula's perspective on events that took place within Bram Stoker's novel. I, for one, am eagerly awaiting its publication."

For the full review, please go here.

VAMPIRE MAN (new song/video by R. H. Greene)

2010-05-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

JUST IN TIME FOR YOUR HALLOWEEN MIX TAPE, here comes VAMPIRE MAN, a rockin' new track written by INCARNADINE author R. H. Greene and performed by his good friend and frequent musical collaborator Johnny English.

The VAMPIRE MAN YouTube video is an homage to great silent horror classics, including Murnau's NOSFERATU and FAUST, DER GOLEM, CALIGARI and many others. A free signed edition of INCARNADINE goes to the first reader who can name all the movies represented.

Q and A with INCARNADINE author R. H. Greene

2010-04-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

The following Q and A was conducted just before the publication of INCARNADINE: The True Memoirs of Count Dracula, a new novel by R. H. Greene. The book is available in hardcover via both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com and in select bookstores, with a special electronic edition available via the Amazon Kindle Store for $6.49 per download.

Q: We seem to be in the midst of a major vampire fad. Did this factor into your thinking when you wrote Incarnadine?

R. H. Greene: I wish I could credit myself with so much forward thinking, but no, it didn’t – not at all. The first rather complete draft of Incarnadine was finished in the summer of 2007, mainly to fulfill some psychological needs of my own I would say. As presumptuous as it sounds, my intentions were literary, although it’s up to others to decide how close I came to deserving that rather imposing adjective. When I started shopping the book in 2008, others more “in the know” explained to me there was a movement of sorts underway – I read a lot, but cancelled library books and oddball historical works mostly, not the bestseller lists. I had good agency responses to Incarnadine at a very high level, in particular from some very nice people at CAA, but they were reluctant to take the project on because of potential conflicts of interest. Catherine Hardwicke, whom I’ve met and even hosted for a classroom discussion about her film The Nativity Story, turned out to be a client of the agent I talked to, and to show you how out of the loop I was, I didn’t even know Twilight existed at the time. Other people mentioned The Historian to me later on – a book I’d not heard of despite its raging success, and thankfully a very very different piece as it turns out. So Incarnadine was written in complete and blissful isolation – literally, since I holed up in Bulgaria to write it. I think this makes it a very different book than it might have been if I’d had one eye on market trends – a better one, I hope. So I wrote with other models in mind.

Q: If you weren’t aware of Twilight and The Historian, what “models” are you referring to?

Greene: Well, Stoker of course, although virtually nothing in Incarnadine other than the coda has any antecedent in Dracula. I’d never be cheeky enough to mention myself in the same breath as a brilliant artist like John Gardner, except to say that I read Grendel back in high school like a lot of people, and the book still haunts me to this day. Gardner’s conceit – of telling the story of a legendary monster from the monster’s perspective, and then using that space as a new way of looking at human behavior – was a master stroke, and I think it’s the reason why that particular work is the one of his that seems to endure. I was also resonating to a certain moment in my own life, one that everyone confronts eventually I think. My mother died at Christmas time in 1997, followed by my father a few years back, and it changed my thinking, as it does for a lot of people. It’s summed up in the quotation from Paul Auster cited at the front of the book, about how when you reach a certain moment in life, you find yourself spending as much time with the dead as with the living. He’s talking about memory, I think – how some people never leave our thoughts, and how this is both comforting and a wound that never heals. And what character out of literature is more suited to dramatizing that conflict than Stoker’s Dracula – someone who is both living and dead simultaneously? So this is where the idea came from, I’m relatively sure.

Q: You also cite Milton in your frontspiece, and I noticed your Dracula figure refers to God as “the Adversary,” which is Milton’s term for Satan in Paradise Lost.

Greene: Yes. There’s no better argument in literature for the law of unintended consequences than Milton’s Lucifer – a monster people like Blake and Byron later took to be the hero of the work. I don’t think Milton meant his epic to be read that way, but I do think he was a great writer whose greatness was similar to Shakespeare’s, in that he was open to the vast internal complexities of all his characters, not just the characters he agreed with. Milton refused to make his villains into strawmen by using them as mouthpieces for easily refutable arguments, so Milton’s Lucifer is persuasive, multi-layered and fully explicable, and the verse he’s given is as beautifully expressed as anything else in the poem. But if we gravitate toward Satan when he says things like “Evil be thou my good” or “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n,” this probably says more about our changed relationship to moral authority than it does about Milton’s intentions. My Dracula figure –who isn’t Vlad the Impaler, though he’s designed so he can co-exist with the extant historical data if that makes any sense -- is like Milton’s Satan in that he’s both at war with God and the hero protagonist in his own vision of the universe. The Prince of Darkness approach doesn’t really speak to me, although my Dracula figure certainly does horrific things. But he has his reasons, and they’re legitimate, and I think that makes for a kind of drama that’s subtler and more relatable than having him pop in like the shark from Jaws every time your prose needs a goose.

Q: You keep saying “my Dracula figure,” as if you’re reluctant about it. Is he or isn’t he Dracula?

Greene: Well, he is actually. But he refers to himself that way exactly once in nearly 400 pages, and then only in the introduction he’s written to his “memoir,” never in the body of the work. Partly this is out of respect for Bram Stoker as the “onlie begetter” of a literary classic that’s still inspiring readers and writers the world over. HIS Dracula figure not only needs no qualification but also will always belong to him alone. Also, while my Dracula figure is aware of his infamous reputation, the word itself is redolent of things that go bump in the night, and this isn’t how he sees himself, as he makes clear from the start. And since I’m hoping to get the reader to sympathize with someone they’ve likely been conditioned to view as both entirely fictional and evil incarnate, I’m also trying to get them to forget some of what they already know. I firmly believe that every time that word appears, they’re reminded of… something. Who knows what? Lugosi maybe, or Christopher Lee – both of whom are great by the way, my twin brother and I used to devour their films when we were children, even if they have nothing to do with this book. But the character is so pervasive in movies and everything else it may be impossible for anyone to approach Incarnadine without preconceptions, and so I tried to limit those with a subtle trick of voice. Hopefully, my Dracula figure is more like one of Poe’s narrators, who gives you a reasonable and thought-provoking view of life for five pages, and then, when he’s got your allegiance, starts page six by saying, “So you see, there was no alternative. I had to kill him…” He draws you into his view of things, and then you have to question your response to his actions without the simple comfort of saying, “He did it because he’s something other than me, he’s bad.” And then, going back again to Grendel, the trick of perspective allows you to propose, through the character, that there are different kinds of monsters in life, not only unnatural ones.

Q: Why write the book as a memoir, and why is it a “prequel”?

Greene: It’s funny, I don’t really think of it as a prequel, but rather the first part of a single extended work. I actually sat down to write a wildly different variation on the event structure of the Stoker Dracula – which is coming soon, it’s called The Charnel House, and it was half-finished last summer and going well until someone I love was hospitalized and I dropped everything to be with her because people are more important than things. But as I started working on the first book, I realized I needed to get to know my character better, as something distinctly separate from Stoker since that’s what I had in mind. So I wrote Incarnadine first as a way of getting to know and understand my own creation. Also, he’s at war with God, and the Victorian notion of what that means is very different from the Middle Ages’ one, and it felt like two different struggles that needed to be in their own separate books. Darwin hasn’t happened yet to the Eastern Europeans of the 15^th and 16^th centuries. And then as Incarnadine developed, I also wanted it to belong to a more primeval world, and to feature aspects of the lore Stoker’s research didn’t have access to. So we have a couple of more influences I suppose. Old folktales as well as the Brothers Grimm. I did a lot of historical research as well. That’s why I was in Bulgaria, the most Ottoman of the Eastern European countries in some ways, even to this day.

Q: And the choice of writing it as a memoir?

Greene: A variety of reasons. I was a huge Sherlock Holmes fan as a child – the second book I ever read was The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I was so enchanted by it I subsequently read every single Holmes story in publication sequence. It’s funny what starts to waken inside your head when you write a long work – after a few weeks of serious work on Incarnadine, I had a positive craving for Conan Doyle, which I resisted indulging out of a fear it would get into the voice I was writing in. But although it arguably goes all the way back to Defoe, it strikes me as especially Victorian, this idea of putting multiple frames around a work. And although Incarnadine is set in the Middle Ages, the dual conceit is that it’s either a contemporaneous Victorian forgery from Stoker’s era or, if you want to believe it’s a “real” memoir, that it was written in the first person during one of the gaps in Stoker’s narrative. I literally picked a period from Stoker’s timeline when Dracula is missing from the action for a few days and had my Dracula figure assign a completion date to the manuscript that corresponds. Conan Doyle used Dr. Watson as his amaneunsis, and the conceit was that the stories were written by a real person about a real person, except for the handful of stories written as if by Holmes himself or in the third person. And of course Stoker’s Dracula is written in this very complicated epistolary voice, by Harker, and the captain of the Demeter, and Mina, and Lucy -- everybody except Dracula. So I thought it was his turn.

Q: What do you think of the original?

Greene: It endures because it’s compelling. Psychologically, sexually, morally and, folklorically, Dracula is a compelling piece of work. There are better written books from the same period that are forgotten, and other ones that are remembered but are only read when they’re force-fed to students. It’s a tribute to the strength of the idea and the conception that contemporary readers are willing to struggle their way through a very dense and in some ways antiquated piece of writing because its ideas are so good. We don’t remember Varney the Vampire or Polidori in the same way, even though they got there first. Stoker was trafficking in areas of the id so potent they still enthrall readers today. He’s as much a precursor to Freud as he is to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So I think despite some blemishes, Dracula is literature. My own purposes and needs are very different from Stoker’s, but it would be presumptuous of any writer to aspire to more than footnote status where the original is concerned.

Q: What about The Charnel House? The “re-imagining” of Stoker?

Greene: Coming soon – perhaps finished as you read this, if anyone does read this. There’s a piece of it already available as the coda to Incarnadine, if anybody wants a small taste of a much larger work. Again, the book is designed to co-exist with the original, in that a conceit of the “memoir” structure is that Mina, Jonathan Harker and Stoker were historical contemporaries, and that Dracula might be the official story as Harker wanted it to be told, rather than the complete truth. Unless my book is all a forgery perpetrated on Mina Harker in her dotage. There’s that Victorian addiction to frames again.

Q: For the curious: who are your favorite authors?

Greene: I go through phases – I’m in a T.C. Boyle phase right now, sparked by a belated reading of Drop City. Recently I was reading a whole bunch of stories by a Canadian writer named Morley Callaghan, who was a protégé of Hemingway’s until he knocked Hemingway down in a boxing match refereed by F. Scott Fitzgerald – they really lived back then. As a kid, I’d say it was Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and comic books, until my brother Jim gave me a box set of Kurt Vonnegut paperbacks for Christmas and my head exploded. I was a precocious tween fan of E. L. Doctorow, although I haven’t been able to get through anything major written after Billy Bathgate. Sentence for sentence, I don’t think anybody has ever written American English better than Flannery O’Connor or F. Scott Fitzgerald. For recreational reading, I used to go to James Ellroy until he turned into a screenwriter. Nowadays it’s John Le Carré, who in my opinion is the Nobel laureate of genre, and has also written two of the best books about the post 9/11 predicament and what it’s cost us all while we weren’t looking. I’ve read a lot of Anthony Burgess’s stuff, and come to think of it, Nothing Like the Sun may be an unconscious influence on Incarnadine, though again I’m not in any way putting myself in the same league by saying that, just the same sentence. For what it’s worth, I think Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater is one of the scariest and funniest novels I’ve ever read – his King Lear, and he’s one of the few writers I can think of who probably deserves to have one.

Q: What was the first novel you ever read?

Greene: Dracula by Bram Stoker. Honest and for true.

Marc Abrams, THE WALKING MAN -- A Radio Remembrance

2010-04-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

Marc Abrams aka THE WALKING MAN was the neighborhood eccentric for anyone who lived in the Bohemian community of Silver Lake, CA during the past two decades or so. A compulsive walker who logged around twenty miles a day, he gradually became a folk hero due to his lonely presence on the streets, and the way he seemed to move in and out as a permanent but elusive part of so many lives.

I had a brush with Marc's oddball notoriety about ten years ago when I helped produce my friend Lauren Malkasian's documentary short about him. It's a unique piece of film because, unlike most documentarians, Lauren didn't try to present a bogus and seemingly complete portrait of a complex human being, she just let the riddle of his actions and motivations stand.

The wisdom of that approach became apparent last summer when Marc died, and sordid rumors and news reports surfaced just as a remarkable outpouring of local remembrance and affection got under way.

All art -- even documentary films -- is a kind of shorthand, a sketch at best of a larger truth. And that means all art is incomplete--a suggestion. My own rumination about the very public mystery that was Dr. Marc Abrams took the form of a recent radio documentary piece for NPR-affiliate KPCC 89.3 FM in L.A.. I called it "The Visible Man." I hope you enjoy it.--RHG

FATALLY YOURS gives INCARNADINE its latest RAVE!

2010-03-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

Horror website FATALLY YOURS is the latest prestigious outlet to weigh in with a RAVE REVIEW of author R. H. Greene's novel INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA. Calling INCARNADINE "a thoughtful, exciting, and wholly engrossing novel that sheds new light on vampire lore and lets us experience the grand legend of Count Dracula through his own eyes," reviewer Sally Jahier says "The novel is beautifully written by Greene.... There are lots of profound and major events... all of which add to the grand legend of Count Dracula."

Adding that she "eagerly looks forward" to the publication of INCARNADINE's companion volume THE CHARNEL HOUSE, Jahier concluded by praising INCARNADINE for its blend of ancient Slavic lore and fairytale incident with origin stories for some of the more familiar vampire tropes, and for "delving into more profound, philosophical territory. If you like your vampire stories with a little more bite," writes Jahier, "I highly encourage you to check out Incarnadine: The True Memoirs of Count Dracula."

To read the full review, please go here.

A Rave Review for INCARNADINE from FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND!

2010-02-17T23:31:00.000-08:00

Goth bible FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND has just given INCARNADINE a rave review!

The legendary outlet, launched by Forrest J Ackerman and Jim Warren way back in 1958, calls INCARNADINE an “ambitious” and “authentic” work for the way it "reexamines and re-imagines the mythos of Bram Stoker’s Dracula." The FM review also saysthat the novel “resonates as a meditation on religion and human nature,” adding “[R. H.] Greene has turned [Dracula] into a figure so complicated and engaging that even the most bizarre events are taken in stride because we want to keep reading."

The review closes with a ringing endorsement of the novel, and a strong call for the swift publication of the already-completed follow-up volume THE CHARNEL HOUSE: "Fans of Bram Stoker’s original novel will find a lot to like here. Hell, those of you who aren’t fans of Stoker’s may enjoy this anyway, because it’s such a different take on the Dracula legend. All I know is that, 324 pages later, I’m sucked in and waiting for the next volume!”

For the full review, go here.

BECOMING DRACULA...

2010-01-13T18:55:00.000-08:00

VOLUME ONE OF
THE DARING NEW
RE-IMAGINING OF
A LITERARY CLASSIC

"Impious, audacious, strangely moving, R. H. Greene's postmodern take on Dracula illuminates his darkness by making us feel in our viscera the compulsions that created him. Greene's literary tour de force blends Victorian and modern prose styles to give us new ways of understanding and exploring the vampire genre."
-- Joseph McBride, author, STEVEN SPIELBERG: A Biography

R. H. Greene Comments on His Jimi Hendrix Movie Project SLIDE

2009-12-06T02:16:00.000-08:00

Folks --
A film I'm making with producers Don Murphy and Carol Lewis was recently announced in several news stories. The project is called SLIDE, and it deals with the alleged kidnapping of Jimi Hendrix, the greatest rock guitarist of all time.

Some of the initial coverage used the word "fiction" to describe this project. After digging into the various accounts of Jimi's kidnapping and dramatizing what seemed to me the most likely sequence of events, I would say that's a simplification that borders on inaccuracy.

The finished script is actually inspired by a pervasive story that has circulated for 40 years saying Jimi Hendrix was kidnapped shortly after his performance at Woodstock and held for several days. I did extensive research on Jimi, the incident itself and the period, and discovered among other things that Jimi had told two of his closest associates (including the self-proclaimed "fiancee" who was with him when he died) it was true, though their accounts of what Jimi said happened varied. The details died with the participants, but there's strong circumstantial evidence something occurred, and the known facts, including the actual murder of a Hendrix associate during the same time period, have all been adhered to in SLIDE.

SLIDE is therefore much more grounded in actual events than, say, ME AND ORSON WELLES or LAST KING OF SCOTLAND, to name two films that blend real events and actual personages with created characters.

And additional reports that Jimi teaches one of his kidnappers some sort of a life lesson are news to me. Nothing like that is in the script, and nothing like that will be in the movie.

It's inevitable that reporting on something that hasn't happened yet will contain speculation, so no harm no foul. Still, at this point in the process, I'm pretty much the only one who in a sense has seen the movie. So I thought it would be a good thing to add my voice to the dialogue.

Despite the fact that SLIDE necessarily contains conjecture and speculation (for no definitive version of this story exists), I promise to do my best to make the depiction of Jimi within it as truthful as humanly possible.

best, R. H. Greene

R. H. G. on NPR! INCARNADINE Broadcast takes a Bite Out of Public Radio

2009-10-21T14:34:00.000-07:00

A long radio interview with R. H. Greene is available online!

LA County NPR powerhouse KPCC (89.3 FM Pasadena) featured INCARNADINE on a special broadcast of the popular magazine show OFF-RAMP. Host John Rabe blogged that INCARNADINE is "a wonderful, engrossing memoir of an easily villainized literary figure" and said "I couldn't put it down."

Rabe has posted the entire raw interview with R. H. Greene to the KPCC website. Included are readings of two entire book chapters and a freewheeling discussion of: Bulgaria; Dracula movies; comic books; Sherlock Holmes stories; and some heavy existential stuff about Dracula, GRENDEL and God. It's a fun chat whittled down for a six minute piece. You can get the whole story here.

OFF-RAMP Airs on KPCC Saturdays 12-1 p.m. and Sundays 7-8 p.m

OUR FIRST REVIEW IS IN... AND IT'S A RAVE!

2009-10-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA has received it's first review... and it's a 5 star rave!

Author Randall Radic (A Priest in Hell, Sound of Meat) drew first blood writing for the lifestyle journal BASIL AND SPICE. Radic has given INCARNADINE a rating of "colossal," climaxing his review by admonishing readers to "begin the countdown for the sequel, which has already been written. "

Some excerpts:

"Needless to say, Dracula’s version of his life is vastly different than the one set forth by Bram Stoker. For starters, Dracula is much more sentimental – even romantic – which means he is also more cruel and violent than previously supposed. He is not a detached bloodthirsty monster, who is notoriously callous. Rather he is a passionate creature capable of horrific deeds because of the circumstances thrust upon him. Which means he is – in an elusive way – both charming and believable simultaneously. And it is these qualities that make him a creature worthy of sympathy.

"There is a delicate sense of imminence about Greene’s Dracula. Probably because he is impiously religious. Like the Biblical Satan, whose name means “the adversary,” Dracula contends with the Creator of the Universe, whom he calls “The Adversary.” Simply put, Dracula is at war with God.

Greene... is a superb stylist, couching his language in a kind of Gothic-gossamer prose that verges on the poetic. Yet for all its Medieval rhythm, Greene’s prose does not overpower the ebb and flow of the story... And together, the language and the story serve to grip the reader’s attention....

R.H. Greene has concocted and written a highly-stylized and gratifying restatement of a classic story. The result is a substantial Dracula, who is sensual and very alive.

On the Read-O-Meter, which ranges from 1-star (really, really bad) to 5-stars (colossal!), Incarnadine sucks up a bloody-good 5-stars.

Begin the countdown for the sequel, which has already been written.

For the full five-star review, please click here.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER Declares INCARNADINE / DRACULA THE UN-DEAD in VAMPIRE "FEUD"

2009-10-09T20:39:00.000-07:00

In what the Cleveland Plain Dealer is calling a “Battle of the Vamps” and “a strange feud between the authors of competing vampire tomes,” a new Dracula “memoir” is squaring off against the Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt “sequel” DRACULA: THE UNDEAD in a bloodthirsty battle to the death.

“I’m not sure I know what the Cleveland Plain Dealer is on about,” says R. H. Greene, credited as the “editor” of INCARNADINE: THE TRUE MEMOIRS OF COUNT DRACULA, a book whose conceit is that it was written byDracula himself. “I’ve got nothing against some guy with the Stoker surname trying to re-establish the family `brand,’ if that’s what this is.

“I guess it comes down to who you trust to expand the story of Dracula,” Greene adds wryly. “A distant relation of Bram Stoker? Or Dracula himself?”

The "Vampire Feud" was reported on in the Plain Dealer's October 8 "Pop Ten" of pop culture trends to watch, coming in at number 2. The entire "Pop Ten" list can be viewed here.

FREE STUFF: GOOGLE BOOKS PRESENTS: INCARNADINE

2009-10-09T20:18:00.000-07:00

Wanna see the entire dustcover and read the first 64 pages of INCARNADINE after the "Foreword" and "Prologue" (both available elsewhere on this site as PDFs)? You can, just by clicking on the magical words Google Books...

R. H. Greene's List of 10 Offbeat, Rare and Overlooked Vampire Flicks

2009-10-06T16:06:00.000-07:00

View R. H. Greene's list of 10 offbeat vampire movies here. Titles discussed include George Romero's MARTIN, Larry Fessenden's HABIT, Italian quickie SLAUGHTER OF THE VAMPIRES and THE LEGEND OF THE 7 GOLDEN VAMPIRES, Hammer's sole excursion into Dracula/martial arts pastiche.

Author R. H. Greene Interviewed by THE GUARDIAN UK in London (Video)

2009-10-03T14:17:00.000-07:00

On a recent visit to London, INCARNADINE author R. H. Greene was interviewed on camera by journalist Xan Brooks for the presitigious daily newspaper THE GUARDIAN in conjunction with the European theatrical premiere of Greene's 2001 documentary feature SCHLOCK: THE SECRET HISTORY OF AMERICAN MOVIES at the British Film Institute. The complete segment can be viewed here.