David J. Skal is a leading American cultural historian and critic of horror films and Gothic literature. The author of The Monster Show and Hollywood Gothic, he lives in Glendale, California.
David Skal's enormous, and enormously enjoyable, new biography of Stoker... is a vast and generously discursive work that has interesting and important things to say about almost every aspect of Stoker's life and work... -- The Wildean Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula. Most people don't know much more about him than that, so this hefty biography is to be welcomed... [it] makes many fascinating connections. -- The Irish Times ... highly digestible feast. -- SFX ... consistently entertaining, sumptuously illustrated ramble through Stokerism. -- John Sutherland - The Spectator ... Skal's 'untold story' is an exercise in literary sleuthing, reading back from the fiction to uncover the motives of its making. -- Literary Review Skal's knowledge of the byways of literary and theatrical history is prodigious. -- The Sunday Times He [David Skal] is surely successful in his efforts to revivify his subject and to reveal that even those shadows we think we know may contain obscurities that move of their own volition and which, tantalizingly, remain just out of sight. -- The Times Literary Supplement