The Lair of the White Worm
1911
The white worm slithers beneath Derbyshire's ancient hills, and Bram Stoker, that master of Victorian dread, digs it up one last time. Written in 1911, the year before his death, this is Stoker playing with the old country legend of the Lambton Worm, a dragon that haunts the land, feeding on the descendants of those who wronged it. When young Adam Salton arrives from Australia to claim his inheritance, he steps into a nest of secrets: a sinister estate called Castra Regis, a family curse, and Lady Arabella March, beautiful and utterly inhuman. Stoker weaves Roman history, local legend, and creeping dread into something that feels less like Dracula and more like an old campfire tale told too well. There are black snakes on the lawn, a mad mesmerist chasing a reluctant lover, and a giant kite rigged to hunt birds that everyone insists are omens. The white worm waits below, patient and ancient, wearing a woman's face. For readers who want Gothic horror with a folkloric heart, and don't mind a creator working in strange, late-career territory.
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“She had been to a tea-party with an antediluvian monster, and that they had been waited on by up-to-date men-servants.””
— Bram Stoker
“In the dawn of the language, the word 'worm' had a somewhat different meaning from that in use to-day. It was an adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon 'wyrm,' meaning a dragon or snake; or from the Gothic 'waurms,' a serpent;””
— Bram Stoker
“She has the strength and impregnability of a diplodocus.””
— Bram Stoker
“After all, he was only a man, with a man's dislike of difficult or awkward situations.””
— Bram Stoker
“I want you to have your brain clear, and all your susceptibilities fresh.””
— Bram Stoker
“Mr. Salton had all his life been an early riser, and necessarily an early waker.””
— Bram Stoker
“She asks Mimi and me to tea this afternoon at Diana’s Grove, and hopes that you also will favour her.””
— Bram Stoker
“Edgar Caswall tortured his brain for a long time unavailingly, to think of some means of getting rid of what he, as well as his neighbours, had come to regard as a plague of birds.””
— Bram Stoker
“That combination of forces”
— Bram Stoker
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/the-lair-of-the-white-worm-38a46bc9-a6f0-4b06-9574-050bfbcca5d4"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/the-lair-of-the-white-worm-38a46bc9-a6f0-4b06-9574-050bfbcca5d4)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/the-lair-of-the-white-worm-38a46bc9-a6f0-4b06-9574-050bfbcca5d4][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read The Lair of the White Worm by Bram Stoker free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/the-lair-of-the-white-worm-38a46bc9-a6f0-4b06-9574-050bfbcca5d4Cite this book
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Stoker, Bram. The Lair of the White Worm. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-lair-of-the-white-worm-38a46bc9-a6f0-4b06-9574-050bfbcca5d4.Stoker, B. (1911). The Lair of the White Worm. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-lair-of-the-white-worm-38a46bc9-a6f0-4b06-9574-050bfbcca5d4Stoker, Bram. The Lair of the White Worm. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-lair-of-the-white-worm-38a46bc9-a6f0-4b06-9574-050bfbcca5d4.
