The Lair Of The White Worm

The Lair of the White Worm, which is also known as The Garden of Evil, is a classic horror novel by Bram Stoker, who is most famous for Dracula (1897), regarded as the greatest horror novel ever written. It was published in 1911, the year before Stoker's death. In 1988, Ken Russell adapted the novel into a film starring Hugh Grant. The plot of the novel centers around Adam Salton, originally from Sydney, Australia, who receives a letter from his grand-uncle, Richard Salton, in England in 1860 for the purpose of establishing a relationship between these last two members of the family. Richard Salton plans to make Adam his heir. Adam arrives at Southampton and travels to Richard Salton's house in Mercia, the estate called Lesser Hill, and quickly finds himself in the center of mysterious and inexplicable occurrences. He meets Sir Nathaniel de Salis who is a friend and associate to Richard Salton. He tours the countryside and visits Liverpool and becomes familiar with the terrain and its history. He learns that the area has an ancient history going back to Roman times and the time of the Druids. He discovers that Romans had settled the region and had built structures there. The new heir to the Caswall estate, Castra Regis in Latin, the Royal Camp, is Edgar Caswall who is obsessed with mesmerism. Lady Arabella March is a mysterious widow whose husband was found with a gunshot wound to the head. She is haughty and domineering wearing tight white clothes that give her a snake-like appearance. Adam Salton discovers black snakes on the property and buys a mongoose to hunt them down. He then discovers a child who is bitten on the neck. The child barely survives. He learns that another child was killed earlier while animals were also killed in the region. The mongoose attacks Arabella who shoots it to death. Arabella tears another mongoose apart with her hands. Arabella then murders Oolanga, the African servant, by dragging him down into a pit or hole. Adam, who is shot at, witnesses the murder. Adam then suspects Arabella of the other crimes. Adam and Sir Nathaniel de Salis plot to stop Arabella by whatever means necessary. They suspect that she wants to murder Mimi Watford, who is half-Burmese, whom Adam marries. Mimi's half-sister is Lilla Watford, who is terrorized by Caswall and subsequently dies. Nathaniel is an Abraham Van Helsing type of character who begins tracking down the human monster, Arabella. Arabella assumes a Dracula-like menace as Adam and Nathaniel track her down to destroy her. The White Worm is a large snake-like creature that lives in the hole or pit in Arabella's house. Like the black cat in "The Squaw", the White Worm has green glowing eyes and feeds on whatever is thrown to it in the pit. The giant White Worm eats Oolanga when he is thrown down the pit. The White Worm ascends from the pit and seeks to attack Adam and Mimi in a forest. Adam plans to pour sand into the pit and to use dynamite to kill the giant White Wo

Rarely have I read a book which has so entirely created such an atmosphere of abject horror. No author scares me, none except the master, Bram Stoker. He did it with Dracula and now he does it again with Lair of the White Worm. The evil which permeates throughout this horrible tome is beautiful. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wishes to experience the spawn of hell. A warning to all, this masterpiece has absolutely nothing to do with the movie of the same name. The movie is an atrocious bastardization of this phenomenal tale of horror and should be regarded as such.

I'm not altogether surprised that this book has produced a mixed bag of reactions. It is so different to the very conventional Dracula style of novel that Stoker usually wrote that the casual reader must be totally bemused, if not confused. The fact of the matter is that Stoker was an ordinary novelist, but at the time of his life that he wrote this book he was addicted to laudanum, hence this book is actually a product of drug culture. As anyone who has read novels by drug-induced authors will know, the results can be very odd, and this book is no exception. I loved it when I first read it and I enjoyed the fact that it broke the rather severe 'rules' of turn of the century fiction. Sadly, Bram kicked his habit and his fiction returned to its more staid nature....great book though!