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Q

GARLIC SUCKS

uarantine, day 1,534. There are 372 tiles on the ceiling of your apartment. There are 35,327 grains of rice in a two-pound bag. You have binge-watched

spirits who feasted on the blood of babies. The ancient Greeks had the lamia . Iceland had the draugar . The African asanbosam feasted on children. The Philippines had the mananangga l. During the same interval that vampires were giving Europeans the willies, they were giving us trouble here in North America, as well. Rhode Island and surrounding states experienced a vampire panic—really!— when tuberculosis swept through the region. So, naturally, Rhode Islanders dug up dead bodies, and those deemed unusually fresh— stay with me here—were sometimes de- capitated, sometimes had their unnaturally luscious organs extracted and burned, and sometimes (the lazy vampire hunter’s pre- ferred method, though I’m not judging) were just turned over. A “panic” implies a few hys- terical years, but this being New England, it lasted a full century. I’m sure they strapped a few witches to the pyre along the way for good measure. Those aren’t the only ways of killing a vam- pire, of course. Lord, no! Indeed, my world- traveling friends, if ever you run across a vampire in Europe, a good ol’ wooden stake through the heart will do the trick. (Pro tip: Ash and aspen are the best woods to use). Cornered by a vampire in Russia or Germa- ny? When swinging your stake, always aim for the mouth. The Romani used steel spikes, so keep that in mind, but have a wooden stake handy in case your vampire isn’t a lo- cal. When fighting vampires in the Balkans, you can shoot them dead or drown them or both. There seems to be universal agreement that a post-post-mortem dismemberment, incineration and burial with holy water will keep the vampire from rising again. Or keep them from moving around, anyway. THE COUNT Not only did Dracula not invent vampires, but it wasn’t even the first book on the subject. Ghostly versions of vampires appear in the Odyssey (which is about two and a half thousand years older than Dracula ). They appear in the 1819 novel The Vampyre by John Polidori and in the famously homoerotic 1872 novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Dracula , though, has endured in ways those novels have not. Bram Stoker is particularly inventive in his storytelling; the book is written in an epistolary format—a

By David W. Brown

the entirety of Netflix and Prime Video and have moved on to Hulu. None of your clothes fit and you now wear only king-size sheets draped like togas. You have not groomed in any way for six months. Your cat eyes you warily. What is it thinking? What is it thinking? It is plotting against you. Do not let it succeed. You have vacuumed your ceiling fan three times. You lose 500,000 dead skin cells every hour. If your pillow is more than two years old, 25% of its weight is from dust mites. (That figure is real.) You choose not to google what’s going on inside your mattress, and you are wise for that. You’re wondering about vampires. They can be slain by sunlight. They survive only by drinking blood. They reproduce (on Buffy the Vampire Slayer , anyway, which you binge-watched the first month of quarantine) by feeding from a human and then allowing said human to feed from them. They do not have souls. They are afraid of crosses. They are afraid of garlic. Wait—what? Maybe when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula , he had some sort of aneurysm midway through and just wrote “garlic,” and when he came back to his senses decided to go with it because paper wasn’t cheap. That makes more sense than the folklore, if we’re honest with ourselves. I mean, the whole vampire thing is a little weird. Dracula craves blood but has no heartbeat. (Does it just go in his stomach and sit there?) A stake through his nonworking heart kills him. He can turn into a bat? Did his teeth just…grow in pointy? Even among all that, the garlic thing is strange. But there is a good explanation for it. A good enough one, anyway. HISTORY OF THE VAMPIRE It’s easy to pin all this vampire business on Bram Stoker’s novel, but vampires as we know them roamed the Eastern European countryside and the Balkans in particular for a least a century before the publication of Dracula . It wasn’t just Europe, though. Every culture the world over has been plagued, apparently, with our pale, undead friends. Babylon was haunted by lilitu

Above, Dracula by Bram Stoker. Published by Archibald Constable and Company, Westminster (1897); opposite page, clockwise from top, Digitally restored bat engraving from a late 19th- century encyclopedia; rope of garlic hung from a wall to ward off evil; Bran Castle in Romania, commonly known as Dracula’s Castle, is often referred to as the home of the title character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula .

10 ROUSES MARCH AP R I L 2021