page_title: The Lair of the White Worm
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: The Lair of the White Worm / Reception
caption_attribution_description: Español: Autor de Dracula
context_page_description: The Lair of the White Worm is a horror novel by the Irish writer Bram Stoker. It was first published by Rider and Son of London in 1911 – the year before Stoker's death – with colour illustrations by Pamela Colman Smith. The story is based on the legend of the Lambton Worm. It has also been issued as The Garden of Evil.
  In 1925 a highly abridged and rewritten form was published by Foulsham. It was shortened by more than 100 pages, the rewritten book having only 28 chapters instead of the original 40. The final eleven chapters were cut down to only five, leading some critics to complain that the ending was abrupt and inconsistent.
  The Lair of the White Worm was very loosely adapted by Ken Russell into a 1988 film of the same name.
  The first episode of the German radio drama "Die schwarze Sonne", produced by the label LAUSCH, is loosely based on the events of The Lair of the White Worm. The main characters of the radio drama are also based on the protagonists of the novel and feature in the rest of the episodes even though the plot turns away from Stoker's original story.
context_section_description: Les Daniels noted that while The Lair of the White Worm had "potential", it was undermined by the "clumsy style" of the writing. The horror critic R.S. Hadji placed The Lair of the White Worm at number twelve in his list of the worst horror novels ever written. Historian of the horror genre H.P. Lovecraft, in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, stated that Stoker "utterly ruins a magnificent idea by a development almost infantile."
  In 2019 the novel was featured on the podcast series 372 Pages We'll Never Get Back, which mocks literature of low quality.
caption: Author Bram Stoker, photographed in 1912
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