Academic and literary journals
As I don't like to sit on news insights for months or years before they can be published, I submitted work my to academic and literary journals only a few times. But the times that I did, it was worth the trouble, and the articles are significant testimony to the progress in Dracula Studies.
Linkoeping University Electr. Press 08.02.2012: Castle Dracula's location
Before my book The Ultimate Dracula would be printed and published, I thought it wise to launch and timestamp my discovery of the true location of Castle Dracula via an international academic platform. Linkoeping University Electronic Press offered exactly what I needed: instant publishing with a timestamp, and the guarantee the publication would be online for the next 25 years. The original PDF is still online; below you will find version 8 which I created in December 2013, to eliminate some typesetting problems. The title speaks for itself; the illustrated text is based my essay "The Dracula Maps" as published in my book The Ultimate Dracula.
Linkoeping University Electr. Press 19.03.2012: the Count's true identity
The second essay I published in Sweden was that about the lifetime identity of Count Dracula: In Stoker's imagination, who had the vampire been before he went through death? The answer put an end to the decade-long decade debate about the question, to what extent Stoker had been inspired by Vlad III "the Impaler": a close reading of the novel reveals that Van Helsing and Mina in Chapter 25 identify their enemy as "that other" of "his race," who lived in a "later age" and was inspired by the warlord first mentioned by the Count in his conversation with Harker. Only one historical person can be meant here: Michael the Brave, who actually "ruled over nations."
De Parelduiker 10/2012
A claim by Dutch-American film maker Tonny van Renterghem that his grandfather would have been the true role model for Professor van Helsing started an intense investgation into the life of Dr Albert van Renterghem and Frederik van Eeden, a well-known poet who was a partner in his famous clinic for hypnotic treatment in Amsterdam. I unearthed Albert's 1000-page biography, spoke with Tonny's widow Susanne, and looked through dozens of letters and publications on hypnosis from the Victorian Age. Although there were many suitable candidates who could have connected Bram Stoker with the Dutch psychiatrists, such as Frederic Myers, William Heinemann or Charles Lloyd Tuckey, in the end I could not find any hard proof that the author of Dracula had known the two brain doctors from Amsterdam and that either of them had inspired the main hero of his novel. I decided to condense my 70-page research dossier to an article that was published by the Dutch literary magazine De Parelduiker (Amsterdam: Lubberhuizen) on October 2012. The text is in Dutch.
Journal of Dracula Studies 10/2014
Already in May 2012, I had started an essay to present my insights about the paradox Stoker was facing as an author: presenting a supernatural story as a series of authentic events. Most of the ideas were already contained in "Bram Stoker's Vampire Trap," and in the Christmas 2013 issue of the TSD, I addressed the same issue again, as it explains many of the riddles and contradictions in Dracula. To reach a still wider audience, I created this illustrated essay. Alas, the Journal of Dracula Studies could not publish pictures. I submitted a text-only version on 29 April 2014, which was published in October 2014. I archived the illustrated manuscript, however, and in February 2015 found the time to change the text to American (instead of British) English. My research into the Icelandic preface triggered my discovery of the Makt myrkranna serialization in Fjallkonan in January 2014. By now, the discovery of the Swedish serializations and of the thoughts of a pious pastor in the preface of Mörkrets makter has changed my assessment of the Icelandic foreword; the broader argument of this essay, however, is still valid.
Bulletin Trans. Univ. Brașov 10/2017
In March 2017, Florin Nechita invited me to write an article for the Philological Bulletin of the Transilvania Society of Brașov. As I was just trying to get a clear sight of the making of Mörkrets makter, I produced a text on this issue, dedicating fresh research to the morphology of the two seriazations of 1899-1900. I established, among others, that in both publications, the Transylvanian part must have been printed from the same print stock. I submitted my article on 21 April 2017, but the magazine was only published in October 2017.
Helion Special SciFi issue 12/2019
By invitation of Marius Crișan from West University, Timișoara, Magda Grabias and I spoke at the HELION Conference , held 6-8 May 2017, where I presented my visual paper "Count Dracula: A Vampire from Another Planet?” A year after the conference, Marius asked us to convert our presentations into an article for a special edition of the HELION magazine. In June 2018, I submitted my manuscript, which was translated to Romanian and published in June-July 2019. You can download the (unillustrated) English text below.
MöMa Mini-Mysteries
My second contribution to the Philological Bulletin of the Transilvania Society of Brașov deals with anomalies, curiosities and cross-connections relating to the Nordic variants of Dracula (1899-1900). Although these "mini-mysteries" provide no definitive proof of the authorship of Mörkrets makter, they seems to give us some subtle clues suggesting that these versions were created in Sweden entirely, without Stoker providing an early draft or otherwise contributing to the changed content.