Serial Obituaries
This same story arc also sees Wolfman inaugurating a narrative technique to which he will return intermittently throughout the series: capsule biographies of Dracula’s victims presented immediately before their deaths. Once again, it is connected to his growing feelings for Sheila. In Issue 23, he realizes he must feed, but that he must also spare Shiela. Initially, this decision is presented as entirely rational, since he needs her for a servant: “So she must live, and it will be another who will die.” As he laves, he is flooded with “a curious sensation”: “a feeling that says that some lives should be held sacred. ‘Bah,’ Dracula retort,—‘Lives exist only for my sport.’ / And he repeats that silent shout in hopes that someday he might believe it.”
It’s a surprising moment, since we have never seen Dracula show any compunction about his need for blood; it is as though Sheila’s own naive trust in him has already started to have an effect. The next two pages further develop the question of empathy for his victims, but this time that empathy is cultivated within the consciousness of the readers (who by now may well have become too jaded to be shocked by yet another vampire attack.
The scene shifts from the castle to a one woman driving a green VW bug. I quote the description in full, as both an example of Wolfman’s technique and a demonstration of how thoroughly irrelevant this section is to the plot:
Caroline Bascombe has been traveling all night, and the radio beside her has been her only company.
It sings to her, making the hours pass more quickly, and, unconsciously, she hums alone with it.
Caroline smiles; her mother only had a fever. The doctors say it will pass. And Randolph called saying the kids have been behaving, and that they missed her.
And Randolph also said he never realized how hard it is keeping the house clean and the kids in line, and that maybe he now understands why she is always tired when he comes home from work.
The music faces and the news begins. “Strikes continue…” The sounds would have gone on hadn’t Caroline glanced downwards, wrinkled her face at the bad news, and switched the station for some more music.
When she looks up again, Caroline sees the fog has crowded around her car. Even her lights can’t penetrate it.
“Damn,” she thinks to herself. She wanted to be home by morning.
Through the heavy fog she sees a shape—human? Animal? Yes—it is a man.
God, it’s a man standing in the center of the road. Caroline slates the break down hard.
The car jerks suddenly and swerves to the left.
But not nearly enough.
There is a sickening crunch as metal hits flesh.
She gets out of the car and is immediately attacked by Dracula.
As the plain of his fangs turn [sic] to pleasure, Caroline Bascombe’s screams end, and her body falls limp.
She dies, then, and three days she will finally return home to Randolph, and then Teddy and little Emily—yes, even darling little Emily—will have their mother back.
Two years from now Randolph will fall beneath Blade’s knife. Caroline and Teddy will suffer from bloodless and perish. Emily will live 150 years before she, too, dies.
For the attentive reader, this extended digression is a reminder of the compromised moral framework of not just Dracula’s existence, but that of everyone who (however briefly) survives an encounter with him. Sheila is spared, but we are forced to see the cost of her survival, a cost with ramifications extending 150 years into the future. This is, of course, the basic fact of vampirism: the vampire’s unlife is always at the expense of ordinary human beings. It is a fact that Sheila ignores as long as she can, but must ultimately face.
Even more important, though, is the way in which the text demands the moral engagement of the reader. We, like the vampire, can grow jaded by the parade of future corpses whom Dracula encounters on a nightly basis, and therefore can sympathize with Dracula too much. One of the plot points that repeats throughout Tomb of Dracula is the bonds of affection that develop between Dracula and the occasional human, perhaps modeling the affection of the readers. The recurring motif of capsule biographies of otherwise anonymous victims is an important corrective to the moral drift that so often results from Dracula’s seductive charms.