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The Mercury Theatre program pulled in only about 4 percent of the nation's radio audience, and the broadcasts made few attempts to dumb down their material. We often think of Dracula the novel as some creaky antique that just happened to give us one of literature's most lasting characters, but if you have occasion to read it again, note what a modernist primer it is. It's a collage novel composed of journal scraps, ciphers, bills of sale, sound cylinders, letters, and what Welles terms "memoranda" in his intro to the Mercury broadcast. Welles plays Doctor Seward, acting as the de facto narrator, and also takes on the title role, giving the vampire an unexpected aura of disturbing sexuality.The public of 1938 mostly associated Dracula with the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi in his classic role, or else the stage play, also starring Lugosi, that predated it. I love the Lugosi film, but it's a real creaker, so Welles's adaptation already had a built-in shock factor—audiences weren't expecting something so raw to come out of their radios. (Welles was a lusty guy; there's even an in-joke in the broadcast when a sailor throws himself overboard and is given the name of one of Welles's romantic rivals.)Truth be told, the Mercury Dracula is practically orgiastic in its deployment of sound. For instance, normally, musical cues and sound effects were positioned after some dialogue or a scene had concluded, but Welles—with no less a composer than Bernard Herrmann overseeing the music—has mattocks fall on earth as people talk. Wolves bray in unison with Dracula's slightly metallic-tinged lines. Waves pound against scuppers as perfervid outbursts of fear and desolation overlap.Welles's Dracula becomes more sensually aggressive as the broadcast goes on; he's creepy at first, but he becomes more and more venturesome, with Welles going into chanting mode, just about, with a rigor suggesting the steady pace of masturbation as the Count intones about "wing, tooth, scale, tissue of flesh." His refrain, an eldritch leitmotif of "flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood," is exactly the sort of corruption of Christian iconography that Stoker was after, and I have no doubt that Welles had instructed the production's Lucy and Mina (the latter played by no less than Agnes Moorehead) to sound like they were climaxing after he got through with it. ("Make like you did last night," I imagine him saying.)You have to wonder what Ma and Pa Middle America made of all of this. The chanty hoodoo of the production would resurface in Welles's on-the-cheap cinematic mounting of Macbeth (1948), and the two works have always struck me as cousins of a sort. Macbeth is haunted by a greater-than-usual presence of the Weird Sisters, whereas the very soundscape of Dracula is like something escaped from a cauldron to do some dark bidding. Only here, that cauldron is a radio.Colin Fleming's fiction appears in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Boulevard, and Black Clock, and he also writes for the Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and the Boston Globe. His next book, The Anglerfish Comedy Troupe: Stories from the Abyss, comes out in August from Dzanc, and he's also a regular contributor to NPR's Weekend Edition.Truth be told, the Mercury Dracula is practically orgiastic in its deployment of sound.