As can be seen in the original manuscripts of “The Secret of the Growing Gold” and the novel Miss Betty (at the Brotherton Collection in Leeds), most of these stories were hurriedly composed on pocket-sized postcards during haphazard breaks from his hectic work at the Lyceum. It is a miracle that he found time to write anything at all during his exhausting daily eighteen-hour schedules; and much of his creative work was reserved for his vacations.

Stoker’s Cruden Bay, a remote little fishing village (which featured a Dracula-style castle) on the east coast of Scotland, became his favorite retreat and escape from the busy theater world; it inspired his novella The Watter’s Mou’ ( 1895), the much longer novel The Mystery of the Sea (1902), and the short tale “Crooken Sands” (Holly Leaves, December 1, 1894). The year 1894 was especially productive for his short fiction, seeing the publication of “The Man from Shorrox” (Pall Mall Magazine, February 1894) and “A Dream of Red Hands” (part of the “Novel in a Nutshell” series in the Sketch, July 11, 1894).

Nearly all of Stoker’s best short stories were written and published during the same seven-year period (1890—97) he spent researching the historical and geographical background of the narrative that would become the definitive vampire novel of all time: Dracula (1897).

Stoker’s first supernatural horror-novel after Dracula was The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), somewhat underrated today, although the original text, with its grim and terrifying climax (modified to a less realistic happy ending in most reprints), appeared in three separate editions in 1996, of which the best is the expertly annotated version published by Desert Island Books.

At the same time Stoker wrote a series of tales comprising “The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party” and published collectively as Snowbound in 1908. “A Star Trap” was the fourteenth of these fifteen tales. (In the text presented here, we have made slight cuts at the beginning and end of the tale so that it can stand as a separate unit rather than as part of an interlinked succession of narratives.) In his preface Stoker cagily stated: “The Truth—or rather Accuracy—of these stories may be accepted or not as the Reader pleases.”

Although he became a much busier and full-time writer in the six years following the death of Sir Henry Irving in 1905, producing several novels, including The Lady of the Shroud (1909) and The Lair of the White Worm (1911), and numerous articles and romantic nonhorrific tales, sadly Stoker wrote no further short stories of the caliber of “The Squaw,” “The Burial of the Rats,” and “The Judge’s House.”

Stoker had begun compiling a collection of his best stories when he died on April 20,1912. The volume eventually appeared in April 1914 under the title Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, with a preface by his widow Florence. Adorned with a splendid colorful dust jacket showing a howling wolf standing on an unconscious man (Jonathan Harker) in a snowbound graveyard, this cheaply priced hardcover volume proved very popular and passed through fourteen printings in twenty years. All the stories from that collection have been reprinted here. “Dracula’s Guest” itself is a seemingly independent tale derived from an early segment omitted from the 1897 novel.