MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Now to good news for a group of fans who've been waiting more than a century for new content. A short story by "Dracula" author Bram Stoker was discovered by a pharmacist in Dublin. The story first appeared in an Irish newspaper back in 1890. Now it is being independently published. It's called "Gibbet Hill." A gibbet is a gallows, for those who may be wondering, and it's a gruesome tale about three children who accost a man on the road. NPR's Megan Lim has the story.
MEGAN LIM, BYLINE: In a way, this story actually starts in 2021, when Brian Cleary woke up suddenly deaf in one ear.
BRIAN CLEARY: I remember coming home from the hospital when I was told it was permanent, and the tinnitus was melting my brain. And it's a dark situation.
LIM: It's called sudden sensorineural hearing loss. The condition required him to get a cochlear implant and relearn how to hear. So he turned to music.
CLEARY: I needed to listen to very simple sounds so that my hearing could develop and I could learn to differentiate pitch again and to learn to appreciate music again.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
CLEARY: I was like a little baby. I was learning to hear, you know? So I figured lullabies might be a good place to start. It's just one simple note at a time from a glockenspiel.
LIM: These lullabies became something of a soundtrack to his life, and he would listen to them while pursuing another task that helped him cope, writing. It started with a blog, but then he moved to another longtime goal of his - writing an 18th-century historical fiction inspired by a local hero.
CLEARY: I live near where Bram Stoker was born, so I actually pass that house every day. So I have an interest in local history.
LIM: He'd go to archives at the National Library of Ireland, playlist in tow, and look up all things Stoker.
CLEARY: I was systematically going through every newspaper report of Bram Stoker as part of my world-building process for my own writing.
LIM: One day, he stumbled on a newspaper from 1890.
CLEARY: I spotted an advert for a short story by Bram Stoker called "Gibbet Hill," and I went, what the heck? I have never seen that before in my life, and I've read a lot about Stoker. And I started holding my breath because I thought, maybe this is lost work from Bram.
LIM: So he had to find it.
CLEARY: I go flying back through the editions, back to the 17 December one, and I raced through the pages to the supplement. And sure enough, I'm looking at "Gibbet Hill" by Bram Stoker, all rights reserved.
LIM: Tom Lawlor is co-director of the Bram Stoker Festival in Dublin. He's one of the people Cleary called up after making the discovery.
TOM LAWLOR: When we heard the full details, myself and Maria and Naoise, who's our associate director, got off that Zoom call, immediately called each other and, I think, probably swore more times than we ever have collectively on a phone call before because we immediately thought, this is huge. This is global.
LIM: The story made its debut at the festival last week, with a reading by Irish actress Eileen Walsh.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
EILEEN WALSH: (Reading) A tombstone by the roadside marking the spot where, a century ago, a poor seaman, trudging on his way from Portsmouth, was murdered.
LAWLOR: It is rare that you have 200-plus people gathered in a room with pin-drop silence for a half an hour at any event. And when Eileen Walsh was reading that story, that's exactly how the room was.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
WALSH: (Reading) Then the snake twined itself around the child's ankle and began to climb its way up his body, wriggling around and around his leg and thigh and up and up.
LIM: Sure, finding something like this is any history nerd's dream, but how does it measure up to his other work?
PAUL MURRAY: I could see instantly that this was an important story, an important addition to the Stoker canon.
LIM: Paul Murray is a Stoker biographer. He says what's most significant about the finding is the year it was published, 1890. That's the year Stoker started working on "Dracula." And Murray says that there are echoes of themes found across Stoker's career, like snakes and evil children. Lawlor, the festival's co-director, also had thoughts.
LAWLOR: The thing that strikes me the most is just this is the kind of casual, banal nature of the evil in the story. These three figures - the rationale for their sort of toying with the central character is never really explained.
LIM: But regardless of how the work is ultimately viewed, Cleary, who made the discovery, hopes it'll contribute to Stoker's legacy in a different way.
CLEARY: The beautiful part of the story for me is that the funds that are going to come from this are going to be ringfenced into a fund called the Charlotte Stoker Fund, this fund that's named for Bram's mother because she was a campaigner for deaf children back in 1863.
LIM: And Murray, the Stoker biographer, thinks we may not even know the author's full canon with this discovery. He told me Stoker had lots of stories that were lost to time, and they're just waiting to be unburied. Megan Lim, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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