"Full moon, Mount Shasta, California," with permission from Phil Douglis, 2008. Larger.
The Shoulder of Shasta, book jacket, 1999. Larger.
We remember Irish-born novelist Abraham "Bram" Stoker as the author of Dracula, but before he described the dark landscape of Transylvania, he described another unearthly place, a northern California forest.
Stoker managed a London-based theater company that toured frequently. A trip to California inspired a novel about a young woman who settles in Shasta Country to improve her health, never suspecting the haunting power of the terrain.
. . . the moon was rising, and in the growing light the sounds, which up to then had been the only evidence of Nature's might, became at once of merely ordinary importance. And then, all breathless with delight, Esse, from her high coign of vantage on the brow of the great precipice, saw what looked like a ghostly dawn.
Above the treetops, which became articulated from the black mass of a distant hill as the light shone through the rugged edge, sailed slowly the great silver moon. With its coming the whole of Nature seemed to become transformed. The dark limit of forest, where hill and valley were lost in mere expanse, became resolved in some uncertain way into its elements. The pale light fell down great slopes, so that the waves of verdure seemed to role away from the light, and left the depths of the valleys wrapped in velvety black. Hill-tops unthought of rose in points of light, and the great ghostly dome of Shasta seemed to gleam out with new, silent power.
Bram Stoker's The Shoulder of Shasta appeared in 1895, just two years before his masterpiece, Dracula.
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