FANGS AND FOREPLAY… THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF DRACULA: THE TRANSYLVANIA YEARS. BOOK 5- PART 8. AN EROTIC HORROR NOVEL BY SANDRA HARRIS. Â©

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INTRODUCTION TO BOOK 5.

The year is 1891, and Count Dracula and his sex-and-spanking-crazed harem of beautiful handmaidens are still camped out in Dracula’s ancestral castle in Transylvania. Dracula’s brother Vladimir’s head currently adorns a spike on the castle battlements. His brother Nikolai’s head, while for the moment still attached to his shoulders, is filled with resentment for Dracula and a continuing desire to depose him as head of the family.

Dracula’s beautiful wife Anna and his demanding mistress –– and cousin –– Carmilla are each jockeying for position as his Number One squeeze, and he has two newly-acquired sons he doesn’t have a clue what to do with.

Meanwhile, the genteel young ladies of the nearby Miss Peabody’s Exclusive Academy For The Education And Refinement Of The Daughters Of Gentlefolks are all still waiting impatiently for Dracula to fly through their bedroom windows at midnight, to endow upon them the sexual awakening of a lifetime and an introduction into Dracula’s twilight world of pleasure deliciously commingled with pain.

Add to this his domineering mother, his four sex-mad sisters, his temperamental nude handmaidens and a cartload or two of angry villagers, and you might just have an idea of why, for this year at least, Dracula’s dance-card is fully filled out…

This book, as all the ‘ANNA’ books are, is based on characters created by fellow Irish authors Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and is dedicated with much love to the late Sir Christopher Lee, whose performances in the HAMMER ‘Dracula’ films inspired every word of it. May he rest in peace… until he rises once more from the crypt in which he rests…

FANGS AND FOREPLAY… THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF DRACULA: THE TRANSYLVANIA YEARS. BOOK 5- PART 8.

AN EROTIC HORROR NOVEL BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

When Vanessa opened her eyes after her swoon, it took her several moments to take in her surroundings fully. She felt so terribly woozy and light-headed, and yet so far she had not herself partaken of any strong alcohol, unlike her foolish husband Edward! The thought of Edward made her gasp and sit up straight, and it was then she noticed that she was in a bed.

It was a double bed, in a bedchamber quite unlike the room she shared with Edward at the inn. The furniture here was old, very old, but not cheap, like the furniture at the inn. Here, the four-poster bed, the huge twin wardrobes, the two dressing-tables on either side of the bed, one for the male, one for the female, and the chairs and armchairs all looked as if they had stood here for a hundred years and more. They were made of a quality and a superior wood one did not often come across nowadays.

Full-length drapes of the heaviest wine-colored velvet hung at the window, which stood open and allowed a light breeze to permeate the room. A small fire crackled brightly in the grate, and over the mantelpiece hung a huge portrait of a very imposing woman, with a magnificent bosom in a low-cut gown of midnight blue and a trickle of blood running from one corner of her red full mouth.

‘I see you’re admiring the portrait of my esteemed Cousin Elizabeth Bathory,’ said a cultivated male voice from somewhere to the left of her. ‘What an admirably single-minded young woman she was, and how many other young women she was more than prepared to sacrifice in pursuit of eternal youth and beauty! I still correspond regularly with her descendants, you know. Remind me to tell you sometime of their exploits. They make for some rather interesting listening, I can assure you. A singularly bizarre lot, the Bathorys.’

Vanessa jumped. Good heavens, she was not alone! She stared in fearful amazement at the extremely tall man she just about remembered meeting in the Great Hall before her swoon. He was undressing to the left of her, placing his dark clothing casually on a chair. His long black cloak, a fabulous piece of workmanship lined inside with red satin, was hanging on the outside of the wardrobe. The clasp looked to be made of real silver, and a heavy, ancient silver at that.

For the first time since opening her eyes, Vanessa realised that she was not wearing the beautiful bronze-coloured gown she had worn to visit the castle and meet the Count and his no doubt charming wife and family.

And indeed how could she be, since it was currently hanging on the outside of the second twin wardrobe, in tandem with the Count’s billowing black cloak! They looked quite at home together, the two garments, as if they had been accustomed to hang together thus, side-by-side in familiarity and companionship, for many a long year.

Vanessa looked down at herself and shrieked. Under the bedclothes, she was clad only in her long petticoat of white lace. Why, she was indecent, practically naked, in the presence of a strange male! Edward would be horrified, scandalised, mortified!

Her pale white breasts heaved in embarrassment over the low neckline of the petticoat, which action only served to make them more prominent and, though this mortified her further, more appealing to the watchful male eye.

‘Did… did you undress me?’ she asked the Count, her eyes downcast from shame and her tones tremulous.

‘Is that a problem for you, my dear Mrs. Wintergreen?’ he asked her quizzically, quirking one eyebrow at her in an unmistakeable gesture of amusement. ‘Surely a man has seen you naked before?’

‘Only Edward, and even then, he has never seen me without my nightgown!’

‘Well then, perhaps it is about time you learned to be properly naked in front of a man. A real man.’

He grinned, casting away his final item of clothing to stand fully and unashamedly unclothed in front of her. Vanessa’s blue eyes widened at the sight of the tall, lean strong body covered in a fine layer of black hairs, with that thing of his standing up perpendicular to his body the way Edward’s must have done too, but Edward’s thing had never looked so long, so heavy, so veined, so big! Vanessa could not, for the very life of her, have wrenched her eyes from it. It was a veritable monstrous beast of a thing, and she both feared and craved it.

‘You are not a virgin, I understand,’ he said, as he climbed into the big comfortable bed beside her, ‘but of course such things cannot be helped in the case of married woman. You are familiar with the act of sexual intercourse?’

‘I… I think so,’ breathed Vanessa, feeling a tingling in her nipples and a moistening sensation in her lady-parts at the proximity of such a paragon of maleness. The nearness of Edward had never felt like this. This feeling was electrifying, it made her feel like all her nerve endings were tenderly, exquisitely, agonizingly alive, and she never wanted the feeling to stop!

‘You think so?’ Dracula laughed superciliously. ‘I see that the actions of the esteemed Mr. Edward Wintergreen in the boudoir have made a great impression upon you, my dear. Well, we shall have to see what we can do to erase your memories of his inadequate schoolboy fumblings from your mind forever.’ He laid her back down against the pillows and began to methodically undo the tiny delicate pearl buttons on her petticoat.

‘Where… where is my husband?’ Vanessa asked him. ‘What have you done to him?’

She barely managed to get the words out. She felt like the power of speech was slipping away from her gradually, along with the ability to remember her own name and Edward’s and the reasons why they were there, in Castle Dracula in the Carpathian Mountains in the wilds of Transylvania, instead of at home in jolly old England, taking tea on the terrace of their house in Windsor Grove. On the terrace when it was fine, in the parlour when it rained or was windy or cold. How far away all that silly politeness and pointless adherence to silly old customs and traditions seemed now.

‘Do you care?’ Dracula asked her brutally as he pulled the petticoat over her head and tossed it aside. His hands immediately covered her breasts, those pale, perfect orbs he had coveted since first observing them peeping out from beneath the fur stole she had worn with the bronze-coloured gown.

Vanessa shook her head and moaned with pleasure. ‘I don’t care,’ she whimpered.

‘What about now?’ he said, as the enormous pale stalk that had stood out from his body so erect and upstanding pushed forcefully past any lingering hint of a maidenhead and penetrated straight to the very core of her being.

She shook her head and whispered: ‘I don’t care.’

‘What about now?’ he said again. The fearsome fangs she had glimpsed earlier were in evidence again now as he bit down hard on the left side of her tender neck, immediately drawing blood.

‘I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care!’ she screamed, before falling into a dead faint with her bare arms flung out on either side of her in a grotesque parody of the Crucifixion.

Dracula, satisfied, began to feed.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

FANGS AND FOREPLAY… THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF DRACULA: THE TRANSYLVANIA YEARS. BOOK 5- PARTS 6 & 7. AN EROTIC HORROR NOVEL BY SANDRA HARRIS. Â©

dracula has risen from the grave

INTRODUCTION TO BOOK 5.

The year is 1891, and Count Dracula and his sex-and-spanking-crazed harem of beautiful handmaidens are still camped out in Dracula’s ancestral castle in Transylvania. Dracula’s brother Vladimir’s head currently adorns a spike on the castle battlements. His brother Nikolai’s head, while for the moment still attached to his shoulders, is filled with resentment for Dracula and a continuing desire to depose him as head of the family.

Dracula’s beautiful wife Anna and his demanding mistress –– and cousin –– Carmilla are each jockeying for position as his Number One squeeze, and he has two newly-acquired sons he doesn’t have a clue what to do with.

Meanwhile, the genteel young ladies of the nearby Miss Peabody’s Exclusive Academy For The Education And Refinement Of The Daughters Of Gentlefolks are all still waiting impatiently for Dracula to fly through their bedroom windows at midnight, to endow upon them the sexual awakening of a lifetime and an introduction into Dracula’s twilight world of pleasure deliciously commingled with pain.

Add to this his domineering mother, his four sex-mad sisters, his temperamental nude handmaidens and a cartload or two of angry villagers, and you might just have an idea of why, for this year at least, Dracula’s dance-card is fully filled out…

This book, as all the ‘ANNA’ books are, is based on characters created by fellow Irish authors Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, and is dedicated with much love to the late Sir Christopher Lee, whose performances in the HAMMER ‘Dracula’ films inspired every word of it. May he rest in peace… until he rises once more from the crypt in which he rests…

FANGS AND FOREPLAY… THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF DRACULA: THE TRANSYLVANIA YEARS. BOOK 5- PART 6.

AN EROTIC HORROR NOVEL BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

The black carriage, with the crest of the House of Dracula on either door and the hunchback known to the villagers as Igor sitting silently in the driver’s seat, stood in the courtyard of Ivor’s Tavern and Hostelry, waiting to drive the Wintergreens up the hill to the castle for their eight o’clock dinner appointment.

‘You don’t have to go, you know,’ Leon the barman was saying to Edward Wintergreen now. The English gentleman was having a quick whiskey in the bar while waiting for his wife to finish dressing and join him. ‘We could fix you up with a fine dinner here, we could, some of Magdalena’s nice hot goulash, and plenty of Father’s ale to wash it down. You’d not go hungry. We’d see to that.’

‘That’s very decent of you, Leon, old chap,’ said Edward, draining his glass with a satisfied smacking together of his lips, ‘but I’m afraid the wife’s rather got her heart set on dining at the castle and meeting a real-life Transylvanian count. You know what women are like. We might as well go up there now that we’ve had this rather mysterious invitation.

‘I must confess I’m rather curious myself about the fellow. I mean, what kind of chap buries himself away in a remote little God-forsaken spot like this? No offence to yourselves, of course,’ he added hastily, remembering too late that Leon, his father Ivor and their barmaid Magdalena all lived here too, albeit down in the village and not up in the castle.

‘None taken, sir,’ replied the barman, who was distractedly cleaning the bar with a dish-rag. ‘As to the Count, well, erm, I can’t say as I’ve ever met the fellow personally. I don’t think too many folks hereabouts have met him either. He… he doesn’t go about much, you see… by day.’

‘He sounds quite mysterious indeed, I must say.’ Edward accepted Leon’s refilling of his whiskey tumbler appreciatively. ‘I’m rather looking forward to meeting him myself now, and I know Vanessa is too. She’s literally spoken of nothing else all day, would you believe it? My word, speak of the devil! Here she comes now.’

The two men looked towards the stairs as the recently married Mrs. Vanessa Wintergreen slowly ascended the stairs of the inn, carefully holding onto the banisters as she went and closely followed by Magdalena, who was carrying Mrs. Wintergreen’s fur stole and reticule.

Edward’s eyebrows shot right up at the sight of his wife in the fabulous gown of bronze-coloured satin, low in the neckline (rather outrageously low, he fancied), cinched-in at the waist and full in the skirt.

With the diamonds he’d given her on their wedding day back in England at her ears, throat and wrists (he’d advised her against bringing these on their honeymoon in Eastern Europe, preferring instead to place them in his bank for safe-keeping, but now he was glad to see them adorning her person), and her masses of blonde hair dressed in an elaborate confection of tiny pearls and glittering diamond flowers, he had truly never seen her look more ravishing.

He wanted to ravish her right now, in fact, right here in the bar, maybe on one of the sofas with Leon and Magdalena watching. He wanted to tear that gorgeous satin dress off her body and jam his stiff prick right up to the hilt in between her legs. He wanted to make her cry out with pleasure and passion, like he’d done earlier today when he’d taken her roughly, like a farmhand might take a chambermaid, on their big double bed upstairs at the inn.

He took a swig of whiskey to cover his confusion at having entertained such vulgar thoughts about his lady wife, then choked on it and had to be pounded vigorously on the back by the quick-thinking Leon, who was round the bar in a thrice.

Good heavens, what the devil had come over him? He’d never had such lustfully earthy thoughts about Vanessa before, only since coming to this queer, isolated place in the Transylvanian mountains. Red in the face from choking and mortification, Edward chanced a light, embarrassed laugh. ‘You see what you do to me, my dear?’

‘Oh Edward, my darling, you frightened me so!’

Vanessa fussed around him like a mother hen, while Leon and the sulky-faced Magdalena stood to one side and watched. Edward looked down the décolletage of his wife’s gown and was aroused anew at the sight of her full white breasts, pushed fetchingly upwards and outwards by the tightly-laced corseting all the ladies were wearing these days.

Christ, how he wanted to fuck her! He wanted to fuck her till she couldn’t see straight, stand upright or sit down properly. He wanted to fuck her in every hole she possessed, and then force her pretty lips apart and splatter them with his issue. Then, unable to believe the filthiness of his own mind, he coughed and spluttered so violently that Vanessa only fussed and fluttered all the more about him.

‘Well, I suppose we’d better be cutting along,’ Edward said when he’d somewhat recovered his composure but was still pulling at his collar, feeling it to be too tight, and anxious to be out in the fresh night air. It was suddenly much too hot and airless in the bar. ‘We can’t keep the driver waiting any longer, I suppose.’

‘There’s no rush, is there?’ said Leon, hurrying back behind the bar and refilling Edward’s whiskey glass once more. ‘Don’t worry about the driver. He’s paid to wait, he is. You take your time, Mr. Wintergreen. I’m sure you’ve time for another one, on the house this time?’

‘Well, I really shouldn’t,’ Edward said, looking at his ornate pocket-watch, a wedding gift from his mother, and missing the cross look his wife directed at him and the much crosser one directed at Leon by Magdalena. ‘But since it’s on the house…’

Edward was more than a little tipsy when the pair of honeymooners eventually left the bar. Leon accompanied them outside, involuntarily crossing himself at the sight of Igor the hunchback, dressed in a black cloak and hat, all hunched over on the driver’s seat, silent and uncommunicative as the grave.

‘Don’t go!’ said Leon, just as Edward was helping Vanessa into the carriage. ‘Stay here, we’ll play cards. My father will play and so will his regulars, we’ll have a lock-in and make a regular party of it!’

‘Leon, let them go!’ exclaimed Magdalena, pulling him away from the carriage by the shirt-sleeves. ‘They want to go, just let them go and be done with it!’

‘You know what they’re walking into, Maggie!’ he snapped back, holding onto the carriage door as it began to pull out of the courtyard. ‘Have you no heart, woman, no compassion, no feelings?’ The two were still arguing as the carriage set off at almost breakneck speed for the path that wound its way up the jagged mountainside.

‘Do you know,’ remarked Edward with an intoxicated giggle as they were jolted from side to side by the speed to which the driver urged the four jet-black horses with the black plumes bobbing to and fro on their proud heads, ‘if I didn’t know better, I could have sworn that Leon didn’t want us to leave the inn tonight and go visiting at Castle Dracula.’

‘What a rather bizarre notion, Edward dear!’ replied his wife, attempting with difficulty to retain her upright position as the carriage climbed ever higher on the mountainside. ‘Why ever should he wish to do such a strange thing?’

‘Dashed if I know, m’dear,’ said Edward, folding his arms and preparing to take a little whiskey-fuelled nap. ‘Dashed if I know…’

FANGS AND FOREPLAY… THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF DRACULA: THE TRANSYLVANIA YEARS. BOOK 5- PART 7.

AN EROTIC HORROR NOVEL BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

A pair of huge black gates creaked ominously apart of their own accord to permit them entrance.

‘Edward, for pity’s sake, wake up!’ urged Vanessa, shaking her husband by the shoulder to no avail. ‘We’re here. We’re at the castle! Wake up!

In the back of the carriage, Edward snored gently and paid no heed at all to his wife’s panicked ministrations. Vanessa, mortified, continued shaking him and calling his name as the carriage drew to a halt inside the castle gates. Once they were safely inside the castle’s courtyard, the big black gates creaked closed once more, again seemingly of their own accord.

‘Sleeping it off then, is he?’ grinned the hunchback.

He had leaped down from the driver’s seat with what Vanessa assumed was surprising agility for a hunchback, and had opened the carriage door and was poking a completely insensible Edward in the chest now, an activity which seemed to afford him great amusement.

‘Stop doing that!’ said Vanessa, annoyed.

Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment and her eyes glittered with unshed tears. How could Edward humiliate her like this, by falling into a drunken stupor after consuming too many whiskies at the inn and failing to wake once they’d arrived at their destination? She’d never forgive him for this, truly, she wouldn’t! He wasn’t just letting his wife and his marriage down, but as a representative of England in this strange and foreign land, he was letting his country down too!

‘Best leave him here to sleep it off,’ decided the hunchback. ‘He’ll come to no harm here in the courtyard. No-one will interfere with him here.’ He indicated to Vanessa that she should therefore follow him into the castle by herself, but she hung back.

‘Whatever will the Count and his household think of us?’ she twittered in distress. ‘For my husband to respond so rudely to the Count’s kind invitation is the gravest of affronts to the proprieties, albeit, I can assure you, an unintentional one, so surely we will no longer be welcome here!’

‘Oh, don’t worry about the Count,’ said the hunchback with another one of his disconcerting grins. ‘He don’t bother about no proprieties. And he’ll be glad to see you, I have no doubt,he added with a lascivious glance at Vanessa’s décolletage.

Vanessa immediately pulled her fur stole closer about her neckline and gave her escort her haughtiest stare, which he returned with another grin. What a forward and impudent creature this hunchback was!

If Edward were awake, the drunken fool, he would never have permitted this Igor fellow to leer so obviously and salaciously at her breasts in the low-cut bronze-coloured gown. But Edward was unconscious, passed out like a farmhand in a haystack after a couple of strong whiskies and so she, his wife, would have to fend for herself as best she could.

A nervous Vanessa followed the hunchback through the courtyard to a pair of black doors which seemed to open of their own volition at their approach. Inside the black doors was a vestibule of sorts, dark and shadowy, where Igor took her fur stole from her but not, of course, her reticule, and then he led her from there into a hall of some great size and magnificence, illuminated by the light of a thousand carefully placed candles. Vanessa gasped at the size and strangeness of the place, the like of which she’d never seen before. How foolish of Edward to be missing it!

Her astonishment on seeing the hall, however, was as nothing when she observed the man who was stepping forward to greet her. He was tall, so tall that he must surely dwarf Edward if the pair stood side-by-side, and so handsome! Vanessa had never seen such a truly handsome man in all her born days.

His dark hair, with a mere smattering of grey at the temples, was slicked back from the cruellest but most compelling face and sharpest cheekbones she’d ever laid eyes upon. His lips were full and finely-cut and his dark eyes were so penetrating that she rather fancied, there in the half-gloom of the hall, that they could see into her very soul. She could have no secrets from this man, she thought, and then she wondered how in the world she could have known such a thing on such short acquaintance.

‘My dear Mrs. Wintergreen,’ he said, taking her hand and kissing it (the touch of his lips burned her skin and made her gasp, which fact was not unnoticed by her host), ‘permit me to introduce myself. I am Count Dracula, the latest incumbent of an old and noble family title, and this is my Cousin Carmilla Karnstein, who resides with my wife Anna and I.’

Out from behind him now stepped a woman of such extraordinarily sensuous beauty that even Vanessa felt drawn to her. She was tall, though not so tall, of course, as her cousin the Count, and well-built and shapely of figure. Her hair was long and honey-coloured and fell freely down her back, and her flashing eyes were the strangest purplish colour.

The woman bowed, a mocking laughter lighting up her eyes, and Vanessa bowed stiffly in return. What a handsome pair they made, the Count and his cousin Carmilla Karnstein! Vanessa wondered briefly why the Count’s wife Anna was not present herself to meet the guests from England.

‘My wife is indisposed,’ said the Count smoothly, almost as if he could read her thoughts. ‘As I understand your esteemed husband is also?’ he added with a certain delicacy for which Vanessa was grateful. ‘My dear Mrs. Wintergreen, pray do not apologise!’ he said then, interrupting her mortified apologies. ‘It is of no moment, I do assure you. My cousin Carmilla and my servant Igor will see immediately to his comfort.’

He exchanged a strangely significant look with his cousin, the meaning of which was lost on a bewildered Vanessa, and snapped his fingers at Igor, who nodded briskly. Then Igor and Carmilla left the room together, Carmilla seeming almost to glide past in the manner of a swan. What an odd pairing they made, the tall proud beauty with the strange, almond-shaped violet eyes and the hunchback loping, obediently but, alas, very obviously lop-sided, alongside her.

‘Alone at last,’ said the Count graciously, turning to his guest and bowing low.

He smiled, for the first time showing a pair of white, razor-sharp fangs on either side of his red full lips. At the sight of them, an already overcome Vanessa swooned clean away. The Count picked her up with no more difficulty than if she’d been a doll and strode quickly out of the Great Hall with her.

Some of her elaborately dressed blonde hair came loose from its confines and swooped almost to the floor. The Hall was perfectly adequate for the receiving of guests, but for what the Count had in mind for the charming and utterly English Mrs. Vanessa Wintergreen, he’d be requiring a bed…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

THE WOMAN IN BLACK: ANGEL OF DEATH. (2014) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. Â©

The Woman in Black 2 Angel of Death

THE WOMAN IN BLACK: ANGEL OF DEATH. (2014) A HAMMER FILM PRODUCTION. DIRECTED BY TOM HARPER. STARRING PHOEBE FOX, HELEN MCRORY, OAKLEE PENDERGAST AND JEREMY IRVINE.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Whenever she’s seen, and whoever by,

One thing’s sure; a child will die.’

Funny how the words The Woman In Black conjure up much more frightening images in people’s minds than, say, The Woman In The Sort Of Beigey-Fawn Cardigan or The Man In The Electric Blue Shell-Suit. I’ve no complaints with the title.

As to the rest, it pains me to speak ill of a Hammer film but this one isn’t great. It’s only about half as good as the original film starring Daniel Radcliffe which preceded it. It could have used some sharper scripting, that’s for sure, and maybe some livelier characters too. The characters here are very ‘meh.’ You wouldn’t go out of your way to save a single one of them from being hit by a runaway rickshaw, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, it’s 1941 and London is very busy indeed being bombarded daily- and nightly- by Uncle Adolf’s Blitz. Drippy young schoolteacher Eve Parkins and her snotty headmistress Jean Hogg are shepherding a group of frightened kiddies to the countryside to get them away from all the nasty bombs-es. (Gollum to Hitler: ‘You’re ruining it…! You’re ruining London!’)

Guess where they’re being evacuated to, by the way? This is a hoot. Eel Marsh House, in the isolated market town of Crythin Gifford, where Harry Potter was first terrorised by the spectre of the Woman In Black.

Jennet Humfrye lost her beloved only child, Nathaniel, in a drowning tragedy back in the Victorian times and, being of a vengeful nature, she’s making damn sure it’s everyone’s problem. (She particularly blames her respectable married sister Alice Drablow, who took Nathaniel from the unmarried Jennet and adopted him.) The presence of the children in the house on the damp, misty causeway is all it takes to wake her once more…

Eve is particularly sensitive to the presence of the spectral female because she has something in common with her, something heartbreaking, a desolate secret. She’s the first person to come to the rather chilling conclusion that there’s ‘someone else’ living in the house with them, a ‘tenant’ who hasn’t yet been properly identified.

The ghost has her eye on a particular chubby little fellow called Edward, because he’s just become orphaned and is traumatised and refusing to speak. Time after time, the ghost comes for little Edward and, time after time, is batted resolutely away by Eve. How long can Eve keep up this militant stance against what SKYMOVIES.COM refer to as ‘one of British cinema’s scariest creations…?’

The ghost isn’t terribly scary this time round, I’m sorry to say. Some of the bleak scenery is far spookier. I love the deserted village, although not the madman who resides there. What’s he living on, by the way, rats’ tails and flies? It doesn’t look like there’s much sustenance to be found in the scrubby little village gardens any more.

Come to that, what are the children, Eve and Jean eating up at Eel Marsh House? Not once have we seen a boy on a delivery bicycle wind his way up the causeway path before the sea washes over it and covers it again till low tide. There’s no telephone in Eel Marsh House either, so how do the two women get in touch with the undertaker when they need him, eh…?

I nearly forgot to mention Eve’s boyfriend, possibly because he’s so forgettable. He’s an RAF pilot based at an airfield nearby to Eel Marsh House, and we know for sure he’s a pilot because he always wears the furry collar of his leather jacket turned right up. It’s like he’s afraid to turn it down- even a little bit- in case it means he’s not a pilot any more. What a muppet. Thinks he’s Elvis, lol.

This pilot fella, Harry Burnstow, who has the blankest face, has his own back-story and tacked-on secret, for which he’s seeking redemption. Maybe he’ll find it looking after Eve and the little evacuees and protecting them from the Woman In Black. Or maybe the film-makers will forget to finish his storyline altogether. He’s such a mannequin I honestly wouldn’t blame them.

Having said that this sequel isn’t much to write home about, I would like to see at least two more films in this franchise which, after all, started out very well. One set in the ‘seventies, maybe, with a hippie commune (free love and natural childbirth and all that) coming to live at Eel Marsh House, and one set in modern times, in which a young married couple, together with their child, find out that they’re now the sole descendants of the original owners and decide to come and live in their house themselves rather than sell it. I’d watch the hell outta both of those, lol. Thankfully, there’s life in the old dog yet. (In the franchise, I mean, not in me! There’s loads of life left in me and the franchise yet, lol.)

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

DAVID COPPERFIELD. (1999) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. Â©

david copperfield

DAVID COPPERFIELD. (1999) A BBC PRODUCTION: BASED ON THE BOOK BY CHARLES DICKENS. DIRECTED BY SIMON CURTIS. TOM WILKINSON AS THE NARRATOR.

REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

‘Like many fond parents, I have in my heart a favourite child. And his name is David Copperfield.’ Charles Dickens.

‘Barkis is willin.”

‘Janet, donkeys! Donkeys!’

David Copperfield the book is a mammoth achievement on the part of its writer Charles Dickens. Nearly a thousand pages long, it details the life of the titular David Copperfield from his baby days to much, much later on in his life, and in such detail it would truly take your breath away. I’ve been reading the book myself this year and was delighted to find this film version of it, which was first broadcast on the BBC in 1999, on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

Everyone loves a bit of Dickens at Christmas, whether it’s his perennial festive favourite A Christmas Carol, or Great Expectations, Bleak House, Nicholas Nickleby or any of his other works.

His books are immensely popular when it comes to screen adaptations, the way Shakespeare’s works lend themselves so readily to staging in the theatre. It’s fantastic the way we’re still familiar with Dickens and his oeuvres nearly a century and a half after his death.

In this version, a pre-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe in his first screen role plays David as a child. His childhood at the Blunderstone Rookery in Suffolk is idyllic, spent with his adoring mother Clara Copperfield and even more adoring nurse Clara Peggotty, played by Birds Of A Feather star Pauline Quirke, who’s perfect in the role.

David’s childhood is all tender cuddles and endearments and picture books and gentle tuckings-in at bedtime. His father has pre-deceased him, so David’s childhood is a thoroughly feminine affair.

His blissful existence changes when David returns from a visit to Yarmouth, where he has been staying at the shore with Peggotty’s kindly seafaring brother Daniel (Alun Armstrong: This Is Personal: The Hunt For The Yorkshire Ripper), Daniel’s nephew Ham, Daniel’s niece Little Em’ly (who is not Ham’s sister) and a weeping widow by the name of Mrs. Gummidge, played by Patsy Byrne, the actress who portrayed Miranda Richardson’s dotty old Nursie in comedy series Blackadder.

David returns to Blunderstone Rookery, from the happiest holiday of his whole life, to find that his lovely sweet mother has married her horrible suitor, the grim, black-clothed, stern-faced and joyless Mr. Murdstone, played by an unrecognisable Trevor Eve (Shoestring, the Frank Langella Dracula.)

Mr. Murdstone brings his equally horrible sister Jane, played by Zoe Wanamaker, to live with them, and between them they pretty well terrorise both mother and son. Their only ally is now the wonderful Clara Peggotty, who would die for either of her precious charges in a heartbeat.

After an altercation in which David is savagely whipped by Mr. Murdstone, his nasty step-father sends him away to boarding school against his mother’s wishes. But it was very much what happened to the sons of well-to-do men in the Victorian era. The boys and their mothers had little or no choice in the matter.

At school, the boys were whipped by their teachers and by older boys (for whom they were forced to ‘fag’ or skivvy), made to learn a load of dry, dusty old Latin, algebra, theorems and trigonometry while deprived of most material comforts, and then they left school damaged, broken, determined to take their revenge on the world and with the most intense sexual hang-ups about being flogged that would never leave them. Okay, so I’m making a generalisation here but you get the idea.

David’s head-teacher, the sadistic old Creakle, played by Ian McKellen, is practically addicted to whipping the boys in his rather dubious ‘care.’ David’s only friend and protector is, rather luckily, the arrogant young toff Steerforth, without whose patronage David would undoubtedly have suffered much more in his schooldays.

When David’s bullied and broken young mother dies, not long after giving birth to Mr. Murdstone’s child, Murdstone removes a heartbroken David from school (heartbroken about his mum, not about leaving school!), begrudging the money that would be required to pay for the boy’s education.

He then forces him to work in a London blacking factory of which he is part-owner. It’s no more than slave labour and David is bullied there by the older boys. I’m not sure what a blacking factory is but it seems to involve a great many icky barrels of boiling hot tar. Not exactly the place for a vulnerable child.

David is happy to lodge with Mr. Wilkins Micawber (genially played by Bob Hoskins), however, one of Dickens’s most enduring characters. Married (his wife is played by Imelda Staunton) with several children, Mr. Micawber is constantly in debt, constantly hiding from his many creditors, constantly having to pawn everything in the house in order to have money for food and constantly living in the optimistic expectation that something positive will ‘turn up’ to save his family from starvation and his family name from a perpetual blackening.

The main thing you need to remember about Mr. Micawber is that you should, under no circumstances whatsoever, ever lend him money. It will undoubtedly be the last you see of it. He’s free with his IOUs all right, but unfortunately you can’t eat those. 

While lodging with Mr. Micawber, David has the experience of visiting his friend in Debtor’s Prison and of becoming intimately acquainted with the local pawnbroker, played by comedian Paul Whitehouse. When the Micawbers move away, on the promise of something’s unexpectedly having ‘turned up,’ David decides he’s had enough of the factory.

He runs away to Dover, to the one relative he has left in the world, his wildly eccentric Aunt Betsey Trotwood, played by Maggie Smith. David is as happy as Larry living with his Aunt Betsey and her no less eccentric but kindly and well-meaning lodger, Mr. Dick, played by Ian McNeice.

Aunt Betsey goes to bat for him against the odious Murdstones and, even when she does send him to school, it’s to a nice decent school in Canterbury. While there, he lodges with Aunt Betsey’s cordial lawyer Mr. Wickfield and his beautiful daughter Agnes, who treats David like a brother and becomes a lifelong friend. David has fallen on his feet here, lol.

The star of the whole show is Nicholas Only Fools And Horses Lyndhurst as the startlingly red-haired and sinister clerk of Mr. Wickfield’s, Uriah Heep. Being ‘umble’ is Uriah’s thing. Falsely ‘umble, that is, pretending he’s content to stay a lowly clerk when his ambition secretly knows no bounds. He’s the kind of poisonous wretch, however, who prefers to get ahead by bringing others down and trampling on their broken bodies on his way up the ladder to take their place.

He has his evil eye on Mr. Wickfield’s business and, even more disturbingly, on Mr. Wickfield’s lovely daughter Agnes, and he loathes David from the start, seeing him as a competitor for both ‘commodities.’ He tries to hide his hatred for David under a simmering veil of ‘umbleness,’ but I think both men know the real score. Can David prevent Uriah from doing the ultimate damage to his dearest friends…?

There’s so much more to the story. He meets the love of his life, Dora, and he entertains ambitions himself of becoming a writer, even though his grounding is in the law. My favourite storyline in the whole book/film is what happens to Little Em’ly and the poor devastated Peggotty family when David unwittingly releases a viper into their collective bosom.

And, as the cast list reads like a Harry Potter ‘pre-union,’ may I suggest that, as brilliant as Trevor Eve is in the role of Mr. Murdstone, a black-haired and hatchet-faced Alan Severus Snape Rickman might have been even better?

Michael Boone Elphick plays Peggoty’s suitor Barkis, and Cherie Lunghi is cast in the role of Steerforth’s autocratic mother. Thelma Barlow, who for years played the fluttery Mavis Wilton, Rita Fairclough’s sidekick, in Coronation Street, here portrays Uriah Heep’s mother (‘Be ‘umble, Uriah, be ‘umble!’). Comedienne Dawn French is the tipsy Mrs. Crupp, David’s landlady when he first lives independently. As adaptations go, this is an excellent one, and with an all-star cast to boot. It’s well worth three hours of your time. I say go for it…!

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, poet, short story writer and film and book blogger. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, women’s fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

HARD TIMES BY CHARLES DICKENS. (1854) REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. Â©

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HARD TIMES BY CHARLES DICKENS. (1854)

A BOOK REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

I loved this book when I had to study it in school, just like I loved every other book of Dickens’s when I read it. Does that make me unusual, being a female person who likes Dickens and now reads him voluntarily, for pleasure, and not just because I have to answer exam questions on him? I don’t know, all I know is that I dig him. His understanding of the social mores of his day are really quite extraordinary.

Not only that though, but he’s endlessly funny as well, especially when it comes to depicting characters who have a highly inflated sense of their own importance. Characters like Mr. Bumble, the ‘porochial’ Beadle in OLIVER TWIST, which I read for Christmas this year, or Mr. Bounderby in HARD TIMES. We’ll get to him- old Bounders- in a minute, lol.

First let me introduce you to a Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, one of the leading lights not only of HARD TIMES, but also of Coketown, the grim, smog-wreathed fictional industrial town in Victorian England where the novel is set. Here’s what Dickens says about Mr. Gradgrind:

‘Thomas Gradgrind, Sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over… With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic. You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all suppositious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind- no, Sir!’

It’s important to understand how pragmatically practical, hard, cold and fact-based is Mr. Gradgrind’s belief system, or else nothing that follows will make sense. He eschews all fun and fancy, supposition and wonder, and he brings up his two eldest children, Louisa and Tom, under the yoke of the same harsh belief system.

They may privately long for some fun and fancy, but they know better, much better than to ask for it. They would only be directed straight back to their studies of fact-based sciences and mathematics. They are steeped in ‘ologies,’ you might say. Biology and bacteriology and etymology and every other ‘ology’ you might care to name.

‘Run along and be something-ological directly,’ their invalid mother tells them when they become too tiresome. Mrs. Gradgrind, who recedes into her bundle of shawls when life becomes too much for her (as it frequently does), is completely unable to cope with or comprehend her husband’s strict belief system.

It goes over her head, she is baffled by it. She worries all the time, perhaps, that she ‘will never hear the last of it.’ It’s not until the very end of her days that she has the courage to question even slightly the wisdom of the fact-based upbringing that was forced upon her children by their father. If only she’d acquired the courage sooner…!

The aforementioned Mr. Bounderby- Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, by Jove!- is the best friend of Mr. Gradgrind’s and a prominent local landowner and business-owner in Coketown to boot. Abandoned by his mother at an early age, a fact he never tires of telling people, he was dragged up by the bootstraps by a harsh and uncompromising Life, which Life has made him The Man He Is Today.

Namely, made of stern stuff and not expecting to be fed venison with a gold spoon every five minutes, as is, apparently, the dearest, most heartfelt wish of the Coketown ‘Hands,’ the nameless, faceless underlings who run his textile mills and other businesses for him.

He’s a braggart and a boaster and a bluffer who makes a constant pretence of a humility he doesn’t really feel. He has his eye on Louisa Gradgrind, even though he’s a good thirty years older than her. When Mr. Gradgrind tells Louisa that she must take Bounderby for a husband, she shrugs and says why not? What does it matter, when nothing else does?

A life without fun, laughter, love and life in it is barely worth living so why not? Why not marry old Bounderby, when one rubbish life experience is exactly the equal of another? As I don’t care either way, she tells her father, I might as well do what you ask. The marriage takes place.

Mrs. Sparsit, an ancient, Roman-nosed lady distantly related to ‘the quality,’ a fact of which neither she nor Mr. Bounderby ever tire of reminding people, is Josiah Bounderby’s house-keeper. She has her own matrimonial plans in relation to Mr. Bounderby, and is therefore immeasurably pissed off when he marries the much younger and prettier Louisa Gradgrind.

Spiteful old Mrs. Sparsit is thrilled skinny- well, maybe not skinny, never that!- when a dastardly young hound by the name of James Harthouse starts work with Mr. Bounderby and immediately sets his cap at Louisa.

Mrs. Sparsit is a nasty, prying old biddy who’d like nothing more than to see Louisa brought low and she, Mrs. Sparsit, installed in the younger woman’s place as mistress of the Bounderby house and estate.

Louisa by now is nearly dead inside emotionally, having had all and any finer feelings- or even attempts at same- hammered out of her, first by her father and then by her dreadful posturing husband, with his endless fake humility and making out loudly and brashly that he’s a self-made man who dragged himself up out of the gutters by the thumbnails.

Bored out of his selfish, foppish skull, James Harthouse decides that the thing he wants most in the world is to see Louisa smile at him the way she does at her brother Tom, whom she adores and who also works for Mr. Bounderby. Not in the same capacity as the Coketown ‘Hands,’ of course, who toil in the mills every day like the workers from Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, but in a more official, gentlemanly capacity.

Harthouse can’t stand Tom, incidentally. He calls him ‘the whelp’ and does nothing to dissuade him from descending ever further into a terrible maelstrom of gambling debts that will ultimately be the ruination of him. Harthouse is a pretty much disreputable character.

If he persists in his affair with Louisa Bounderby, a married woman, however unhappily, she’ll be ruined in the eyes of society forever. (You might think that that’s not a big deal nowadays but it was back then, especially for women.) And for what? Because this little jackanapes James Harthouse was bored and wanted a challenge? The bastard…!

Sissy Jupe, the young orphaned girl taken in by Mr. Gradgrind and initially raised according to that gentleman’s beloved ‘system,’ is the one ray of light in the grey and gloomy House Of Gradgrind.

Born and bred in a travelling horse-riding circus, Sissy is a girl of many unusual qualities. She even manages to bring out the one solitary teensy-weensy shred of conscience in James Harthouse, if you can believe that, and is of immeasurable help to Mr. and Mrs. Gradgrind and the poor lost Louisa.

You see, Thomas Gradgrind’s ‘system’ doesn’t have any more effect on Sissy than water off a duck’s back, luckily for the Gradgrinds. It doesn’t ‘take’ with her, you see, and because of that she’s able to lead at least three Gradgrinds, gently and delicately and so as not to seem like she’s leading them at all, out of the murky darkness of the ‘system’ and into the light.

Mithter Thleary With A Pronounced Lithp, if you please, is the owner and ringmaster of Thleary’s Travelling Thircus, and a great friend to Sissy and the Gradgrinds too, in the end. If this book had been filmed in the 1940s or the 1950s, the lovely cuddly character actor Miles Malleson would have been the perfect choice to play him.

Mr. Sleary puts one of Dickens’s main messages in a pretty neat nutshell. People need fun, and laughs and entertainment. They can’t be ‘allus a-working.’ And people are neither facts nor statistics, either, they’re people. 

How right he is. A happy, rested employee is a good employee. Mr. Sleary, for all his lack of any formal education, is streets ahead of the socially ‘superior’ Mr. Gradgrind in this particular matter.

Mr. Gradgrind isn’t a bad man at all, mind you, just severely misguided. When his beloved ‘system’ of facts and statistics collapses and he sees the results of it in his criminal son Tom and his broken daughter Louisa, he himself becomes a broken man.

I do love, however, when Tom, lately turned bank-robber and fugitive from the law, throws his father’s words back at him at the end. In a given period, x number of employees will steal from their employers. This being the case, when Tom himself turns round and steals from his employer, namely Mr. Bounderby, how can it be Tom’s fault?

The statistics speak the truth, don’t they? How can Tom help it if he’s just another statistic? This is one of the statistics once so beloved of Mr. Gradgrind, Superintendent of the School Board and responsible for filling so many little minds with the facts he craves. One gets the feeling that this grievously wounded gentleman won’t be relying on facts and statistics for solace and comfort in the future again.

It’s also hard on Mr, Gradgrind when he is confronted, in the form of Bitzer, ‘the light porter,’ with the very evidence of his ‘system-in-action.’ Have you no heart, he appeals to Bitzer, who is only too glad to rattle off the biological facts that go to prove that, undeniably present in his chest cavern, there beats the physical organ known as ‘the heart’ without which he wouldn’t be breathing and walking and talking and a-taking of ‘Young Tom’ here into custody, and surely Mr. Gradgrind, that well-known lover of facts, is aware of such a fact-based thing…?

Dickens brings in the Unions a lot as well and the poor wages and poor housing conditions of the Coketown ‘Hands,’ and indeed, their conditions are terrible. Unfortunately, however, I failed to like his main working-class hero, Stephen Blackpool, whose accent was drawn as being so thick that I could barely decipher it at times.

Plus he was a miserable git as well. So his wife’s an alcoholic miscreant who won’t give him the divorce he needs to marry Rachael, the real love of his life. Big whoop! We all have our troubles, our crosses to bear. Go out, have a few pints with friends and loosen up a bit. It’s not the end of the world.

I also disliked his mopey martyr of a girlfriend Rachael. Although I felt thorry- oops, I mean sorry!- for them both (ith thurprithingly hard to thop lithping once you thart!), I was much more interested in the actions and activities of the swells. The toffs. The big nobs. The gentry. The, as the Artful Dodger would surely put it, ‘Quali’y.’

Mr. Bounderby and Mrs. Sparsit are my favourite characters, and both long overdue for a come-uppance. How hard are the mighty fallen and all that. Dickens handles these come-uppances beautifully. Good on ya, Charlie. You da bomb.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger, poet and book-and-movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens’ fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra’s books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO

You can contact Sandra at:

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

ANNA MEETS COUNT DRACULA. THE NEW AND FABULOUS EROTIC HORROR NOVEL FROM SANDRA HARRIS!!!

burne jones le vampire
So, you thought that the Victorians just spent their time quietly drinking tea and genteelly repressing their innermost desires, did you? Well, you were WRONG! The household of the wealthy Carfax family is a hotbed of deliciously deviant carnality and vampire sex. The beautiful Lady Anna Carfax is abducted by none other than Count Dracula himself and is treated to the sexual awakening of a lifetime, or should that be undead-time…? The rest of the Carfax family, servants definitely included, are in and out of each others’ bedchambers like rats up the proverbial drainpipe. Even Sherlock Holmes and Jack The Ripper make an appearance in this shockingly scandalous paranormal sex-and-spanking romp set in Victorian times. You’d have to be undead from the neck up to miss out on it…

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.

Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based performance poet, novelist, film blogger, sex blogger and short story writer. She has given more than 200 performances of her comedy sex-and-relationship poems in different venues around Dublin, including The Irish Writers’ Centre, The International Bar, Toners’ Pub (Ireland’s Most Literary Pub), the Ha’penny Inn, Le Dernier Paradis at the Trinity Inn and The Strokestown Poetry Festival.

Her articles, short stories and poems have appeared in The Metro-Herald newspaper, Ireland’s Big Issues magazine, The Irish Daily Star, The Irish Daily Sun and The Boyne Berries literary journal. In August 2014, she won the ONE LOVELY BLOG award for her (lovely!) horror film review blog. She is addicted to buying books and has been known to bring home rain-washed tomes she finds on the street and give them a home.

She is the proud possessor of a pair of unfeasibly large bosoms. They have given her- and the people around her- infinite pleasure over the years. She adores the horror genre in all its forms and will swap you anything you like for Hammer Horror or JAWS memorabilia. She would also be a great person to chat to about the differences between the Director’s Cut and the Theatrical Cut of The Wicker Man. You can contact her at:

sandrasandraharris@gmail.com

https://www.facebook.com/SandraHarrisPureFilthPoetry

https://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com

http://sexysandieblog.wordpress.com

http://serenaharker.wordpress.com

https://twitter.com/SandraAuthor

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SAUGZ6K