Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker gave the world its most enduring vampire, and few writers have ever been so perfectly matched to their subject. Born in Dublin in 1847, he spent a bedridden, sickly childhood before rising, against those early odds, to graduate from Trinity College, work as a civil servant and theatre critic, and eventually manage the great Lyceum Theatre in London alongside his lifelong friend, the actor Sir Henry Irving. In 1897 he published Dracula, drawing on Eastern European folklore and the shadow of Vlad the Impaler to conjure a seductive, terrifying Count who would define the horror genre for every generation after. Drawn to the occult, he also moved in the circles of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The chart could hardly be more apt: Sun and Moon both in Scorpio, the sign of Pluto and Hades, of death, rebirth and the phoenix. His Scorpio Sun shone through transformation and the darkly magnetic, a soul at home in the buried and the taboo. His Scorpio Moon was the inner emotional volcano, the born reader of secrets and shadows. From that all-or-nothing depth came an immortal monster who has never once stopped rising from the ashes.