“There are darknesses in life and there are lights; you are one of the lights.”
Lewis Carroll'’s Alice books are often misremembered as gentle children’s fantasies. Read closely, they are something stranger, darker, and more unsettling.Carroll'’s worlds are not safe because they are nonsensical; they are frightening because they almost make sense. Beneath the wordplay and whimsy lies a world where logic collapses, identity is unstable, time behaves cruelly, & power is arbitrary. Innocence is not protected. It is tested.
Dracula: A Requiem in Terror does not adapt Lewis Carroll. It understands that the most frightening worlds are internally consistent; that identity is fragile under pressure; that power games masquerade as play and that survival often requires transformation.
"And hast thou slain the jabberwcock, my beamish boy?"
- I am but mad
north-north-west.
-When the wind is southerly,
I know a bat
from a bone saw.
In Through the Looking-Glass, identity is negotiated square by square. Progress is conditional. Victory requires transformation. The queen may be powerful, but she is also exposed.
In Through the Looking-Glass, the threat is no longer merely confusing but strategic: the entire world is a chessboard, and Alice is both piece and prize.
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The chess motif in Dracula functions similarly. Characters move according to forces they do not yet understand. They are maneuvered, sacrificed, re-positioned. What appears to be choice is often constraint. What appears to be madness may be the only sane response to an impossible board.
"His vorpal blade went
snicker snack."
- I don't rhyme anymore
-but you should, it was my gift to you. I put them there to help you.
Carroll'’s genius was to show that absurdity is not the opposite of horror, but one of its masks. When cause and effect dissolve, terror enters quietly. When the rules cannot be trusted, the ground disappears.
Absurdity is their camouflage
Victorian London in Dracula is similarly askew. Science argues with faith. Modernity clashes with folklore. Civility coexists with unspeakable violence. Characters find themselves in a world that insists on rational explanation while presenting profoundly irrational threats.
Dracula
Both Carroll and Stoker understood that when confronted with overwhelming forces, the mind reaches for patterns, riddles, repetition, and play. Absurdity becomes a way to endure what cannot yet be named.
This is why humor, rhyme, ritual, and nonsense appear at the edges of horror in this play. They are not relief; they are resistance.
through the
looking glass
Dracula: A Requiem in Terror does not adapt Lewis Carroll. It shares his understanding of how terror operates:
Like Alice, the characters enter a world they did not choose. Like Alice, they must learn its rules before they can escape it. Unlike Alice, they do not wake up.
They fight their way back to the light.
