It had been gathering dust for over a century in the archives of the Irish National Library in Dublin: a short story by Bram Stoker, the world-famous author of Draculawas found by a long-time admirer of the writer, more than 130 years after its publication.
Titled Gibbet Hillthis story was published in a Christmas supplement of the Dublin edition of the newspaper The Daily Mail in 1890, but had never been cited in any work or biography on Bram Stoker.
Brian Cleary, a 44-year-old amateur writer and historian, got his hands on this treasure in October 2023, during a period of convalescence after an operation, used to satisfy his interest in the author of Draculaa Dubliner like him.
“I sat in the library flabbergasted that I was potentially holding a forgotten ghost story from Stoker”, Brian Cleary tells AFP. He is particularly amazed to see that the new date “at around the time Bram Stoker was writing Dracula“, and that it contains “elements of Dracula“, epistolary novel published in 1897.”I sat down to stare at the screen and asked myself: Am I the only person on Earth who read this? Then: What am I going to do with it?“, he remembers.
Brian Cleary then carried out in-depth research to verify his extraordinary find and interviewed Paul Murray, biographer and expert on Bram Stoker, who confirmed that the news had remained unknown until now.
“It is a typical Stoker story, the struggle between good and evil, evil arising in astonishing and unexplained ways, and it constitutes a step on his journey which culminated in the publication of Dracula“, explque Paul Murray.
This macabre tale, written when Bram Stoker was 33 years old, tells the story of a sailor murdered by three criminals whose bodies are hung from a gallows or gallows on a hill, as a ghostly warning to the passing travelers.
To celebrate his discovery, the text of Gibbet Hill is exhibited for the first time at the Marino Casino, a famous neoclassical building in Dublin.
And it is also published on October 26 by the Rotunda Foundation, in a book illustrated by the Irish artist Paul McKinley. “Creating new illustrations for an old story that has been buried for so long” was a “fascinating challenge“, marvels the painter.
His illustrations transcribe the strange and often sinister atmosphere of the text, like verses inspired by a young character in the story who holds a pile of earthworms in his hands.
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