Le Fanu died only six months after the publication of “The Crystal Cup,” and any assistance or personal recommendations that Stoker might have received from the great writer perished with him. Stoker was unable to place any more of his stories in London magazines during the rest of this decade (unless some were published anonymously and never credited to him at a later date).

He wrote many pieces, however, for Dublin newspapers and magazines, chiefly editorials and news items for the Irish Echo and the Halfpenny Press, and theatrical notices for the Dublin Mail. With few exceptions, these pieces were unsigned, though his name was usually appended to his occasional tales of fiction.

In 1875, “A. Stoker, Esq.” contributed three serials to the Shamrock, beginning with the ten-chapter novella “The Primrose Path” (February 6—March 6), which emphasized the evils of hard liquor and ended with a grisly murder and suicide. This stirring narrative was followed immediately by “Buried Treasures” (March 13—20) and, six weeks later, “The Chain of Destiny” (May 1—22). This last story, more than the earlier efforts, established Stoker’s favorite themes of curses and villains, set in a spooky gothic house, where an eerie portrait appears and disappears. A character known as “the phantom of the fiend” is the first of Stoker’s truly gothic pre-Dracula figures.

In 1874 Stoker made the first of several visits to Paris, one of his favorite cities and the setting of one of his most memorable horror stories, “The Burial of the Rats,” which includes this passage (referring to 1874): “In this year I was very much in love with a young lady who, though she returned my passion, so far yielded to the wishes of her parents that she had promised not to see me or correspond with me for a year.” This holiday, made en route to see his parents at Clarens, and the subsequent horror story, was recently turned into a movie of the same name, in which Stoker and his father are the leading characters; otherwise the film has very little connection with the tale.

Stoker’s series of weird and fabular allegories for children appeared intermittently in Irish magazines over a six-year period, beginning with “The Castle of the King” in 1876 in the Warder, before being collected as Under the Sunset and published by Sampson Low in a very handsome cream imitation-vellum format in November 1881 (dated 1882). Some of the thirty-three illustrations by William Fitzgerald and W V. Cockburn are quite horrific, notably the depiction of a blood-spattered giant.

There is much hidden symbolism in these eight tales, which were compared by the Spectator to the work of Hans Christian Andersen. The identity of Stoker and his six siblings is subconsciously veiled in “How 7 Went Mad,” and Bram himself appears in one of the illustrations accompanying “The Shadow Builder.” “The Invisible Giant,” describing a ghastly spectral “doom” or plague, was directly inspired by his mother’s experiences when she saw the coming of the cholera epidemic in her youth. The graphic description and illustration of “The Castle of the King,” with its “tall turrets and frowning keep, gateway with cavernous recesses and beetling towers,” is a dead ringer for Dracula’s castle in Transylvania.