You Were Our Monster

The story of Dracula is well known. The truth it buried is not.

In 1897, a conspiracy of church, press, and aristocracy needed the world to believe in vampires, and they had everything they required to make it happen. An archbishop needed proof of evil walking among men to shore up a faith the age had begun to doubt. A baron with failing estates needed the revenue that fear and pilgrimage would bring. A newspaper magnate needed a single face he could print in every paper in the country until no one thought to question it. What they did not have, they manufactured.

A solicitor agrees to the terms of a contract he does not understand, and they drug him until he cannot tell a staged horror from a real one. A housemaid watches from the edges of rooms where powerful men speak freely, and she learns that the danger in the house wears a doctor's coat. A clergyman counts his profits in the margins of his correspondence while the creatures he has caged are made to perform the very evil he has invented for them.

Those creatures were never what the legend made them. They came from a world that no longer exists, and they carry a vow that forbids them to harm a living thing. The men who held them understood that a people who will not fight can be shaped into anything at all, and so the gentle were dressed as the monstrous and sent out to frighten an empire. Read together, these letters, journals, and asylum logs reveal the real monsters behind the legend.