From New York Times bestselling author, James Reese:
I recently got a request via email from the blogger running The Page 69 Test @ http://page69test.blogspot.com/asking me to turn to page 69 of THE DRACULA DOSSIER and blog about what I found there or… anything, really. A very cool exercise, and a very cool blog. Check it out. Meanwhile, here’s what I came up with:
“On page 69 of The Dracula Dossier, the protagonist, Bram Stoker – yes, that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula – is midway through a letter to his good friend, the writer Thomas Henry Hall Caine. The two men have remained friends despite Caine’s status as the bestselling author of the day and Stoker’s abiding frustration at failing to publish anything of note. (Ironic that Stoker lives on today – not to mention his Count – while Caine is forgotten.)
The novel mirrors Dracula in structure: letters, journals, newspaper clippings, etc. And in this early letter Stoker is addressing the ennui, the domestic doldrums that will soon lead him to accept an invitation to a meeting of a secret, occult society, the Order of the Golden Dawn.
Alas, domestic life has come to seem naught but a circle of anger and apology, a circle set to turning, day in and day out, by the silence of all that is left unsaid. It verily leeches the life-blood from me…