A Halloween Special ... Chris Ames and the Dog in the Nighttime ... RH Greene's News Take on Dracula ... Lugosi, Jr. on Life with Father ... Bats: Behind the Myths ... Creepiest Moment from Richard the Third.
R.H. Greene's new Dracula memoir, "Incarnadine"
Writer R.H. Greene moved from LA to Bulgaria, close to the Romanian border, to write "Incarnadine, the True Memoirs of Count Dracula," which gets to the the legend's historical, emotional, and literary roots. The first piece of audio is an exclusive long version of the interview. The second is the shorter version we're airing for the Halloween edition of Off-Ramp. Come inside for info on his Book Soup reading.
R.H. Greene will appear in Los Angeles at a Booksigning at Book Soup on Sunday, November 15 at 4 PM. (Book Soup, 8818 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90069-2125, (310) 659-3110.)
From the news release:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
LOS ANGELES, CA - Roll over Edward Cullen, and tell Sookie Stackhouse the news. INCARNADINE: The True Memoirs of Count Dracula is coming to U.S. bookstores and to Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. And despite the boom in vampire sagas, author R. H. Greene thinks he has something unique to offer.
"It's for grown-ups, for one thing," Greene says of the first installment in his two-part Dracula "memoir." "I've never read a Twilight novel or seen an episode of True Blood, but I stand in supermarket checkout lines, like everybody. It does seem like we're going through the Hannah Montana era of gothic fiction, doesn't it? I mean, there's an Edward Cullen Barbie doll coming out, you know?"
The conceit of Greene's novel is that it'sa "newly discovered Victorian artifact" once owned by Mina Murray Harker, the heroine of Bram Stoker's 1897 classic Dracula. In Greene's premise, the handwritten manuscript languished for over a century in the cornerstone of a remote Bulgarian farmhouse before being excavated by looters. Their "minor literary payload" turned out to be a first-person chronicle written by Dracula himself, covering more than three centuries of both his human and "un-dead" existence.
In the memoir, Dracula tells the story of his life before he became a vampire, and then leads the reader through his own unholy transformation and that of his three "wives." The action begins in the late Middle Ages during the last great battles of the Ottoman invasion of Eastern Europe, and ends with the first meeting between Dracula and Bram Stoker's protagonist Jonathan Harker.
The encounter with Harker sets the stage for a "very free" approach to Stoker's characters and event structure in Memoirs, Volume Two, which Greene has just completed writing. "Book two is called The Charnel House, and it's a very different piece of work, though in the same spirit as INCARNADINE."
According to Greene, the first-person voice lets the reader experience the Dracula mythos with an unusual amount of intimacy, and also allowed him to write a book in which "Dracula is the hero and God is the villain, which is the way I think a 'Prince of Darkness' would see things. We've kind of gotten away from the spiritual in vampire fiction, but it's clearly one of the core concerns in Stoker's original.
"There's also a whole wealth of detail in Slavic folklore that was unavailable to the author of Dracula, and it's been great fun researching those older traditions and trying to incorporate them into INCARNADINE in a way that feels authentic."
Interestingly, just a month after Greene's Dracula origin story goes to press, the Bram Stoker estate is coming out with Dracula The Un-Dead, an "official sequel" by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt that Greene says "sounds like a detective novel based on the new Amazon extract."
While Greene says he was unaware of the sequel's existence while working on INCARNADINE, "I wish them a lot of success. Nobody deserves to benefit from the ongoing interest in Dracula more than a writer with the last name of Stoker.
"Between their sequel and my story of how Dracula came to be, I think there's a unique opportunity for readers to re-evaluate their relationship to one of literature's most lasting works. And who knows? Maybe it's Dracula's turn to reign supreme again over the genre Bram Stoker virtually invented for him. I'm pretty sure audiences are still going to care about him long after True Blood is just a pile of discount DVDs at Costco, and Edward Cullen has crumbled into dust."
Hey! Rabe Has a Blog!
Go back! Go back to the KPCC home page. And check out the blog section. John's is called "John Rabe." Or come inside this segment for an easy link to one of the John's latest blogs...
Chris Ames on the Ghosts in Laurel Canyon
Chris Ames gets help from a dog who gets help from a ...
Bob Marland's Sandwich Mystery
Note from John: When I worked in Fort Myers, FL, we had a commentator named Bob Marland, who had lived a wild and wonderful life. He looked like a standard-issue retiree, but he had owned a cattle ranch and rode roundups, owned and ran radio stations, kept a bottle of Cutty in the back of his pickup and raised hell, became a Lt Col in the Air Force and knew Jimmy Stewart, and much more. He recorded this story -- about attempted murder among settlers in Western Nebraska -- some time in 1991.
Bela Lugosi, Jr. -- Life with Father
From the archive, Off-Ramp's John Rabe talks with Bela Lugosi, Jr., the son of the horror icon, who helped shape intellectual property law in California.
Special Halloween Preview: Comics Writer Marv Wolfman on "The Tomb of Dracula"
Marv Wolfman took Dracula places nobody have ever imagined when he started writing issues of The Tomb of Dracula for Marvel. The New Teen Titans and Vigilante are other highlights in a long career. In the first audio item, KPCC's Off-Ramp host John Rabe talks with Wolfman about Drac and the others in this Off-Ramp exclusive long-form interview. The second piece of audio is the shorter broadcast version.
Solar Power for the People?
Off-Ramp's John Rabe talks with new energy blogger Herman Trabish from the floor of the big solar convention held this week in Anaheim - Solar Power International. The first piece of audio is the long version of their interview; the second the short version for busy executives.
Have You Thanked a Bat Today?
Bats get a bad reputation - especially around Halloween - so bat rehabber Deborah Crough tries to educate people about how the furry mammals help our local environment. Off-Ramp contributor Jackson Musker flitted down to Deborah’s Long Beach home, put on some gloves, and met two of the bats in her care. (Click on the second audio link above for a web exclusive demonstration of how to pick up a fallen bat!)
Check out the links at left for more information on bat rescue and preservation. You can also build your own "bat house" to give the species a friendly place to roost.
Richard III -- Played Straight
A Noise Within opened its 2009-2010 repertory season this weekend with Shakespeare's Richard III, and they didn't set it during World War One, or have Brian Eno design the sets, or have everyone dress as spaniels. Here's the long version of Off-Ramp host John Rabe's interview with cast and crew, including part of the nasty, creepy, famous wooing scene. ... And the short version we'll play on Off-Ramp this weekend. UPDATE: For our Halloween Off-Ramp, we've added the creepy, disgusting wooing scene, in which Richard wins the hand of lady Anne -- the woman he's just widowed. It's revolting, and well played. Just click on the third piece of audio above.
Kids Read the Darndest Things, Hank Rosenfeld Discovers
When he was a teacher's aide, Hank Rosenfeld had a lot of time to think about kids and books. (Hank is currently touring with his own book, which he wrote with the late-great screenwriter Irv Brecher, called "The Wicked Wit of the West: The Last Great Golden Age Screenwriter Shares the Hilarity and Heartaches of Working With Groucho, Garland, Gleason, Burns, Berle, Benny, and many more." Come inside for details...
Peek Inside Mimi Pond's Dressing Room
Off-Ramp commentator and cartoonist Mimi Pond takes us to her holy of holies -- Ross Dress For Less.