The Lair of the White Worm

The Lair of the White Worm (US, 1966 edition, re-titled: The Garden of Evil) is a horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, who also wrote Dracula. It was published in 1911, the year before Stoker's death. It was adapted into a film in 1988 by Ken Russell. The plot focuses on Adam Salton, originally from Australia, who is contacted by his grand-uncle, Richard Salton, in 1860 England for the purpose of establishing a relationship between these last two members of the family. His grand-uncle wants to make Adam his heir. Adam travels to Richard Salton's house in Mercia, Lesser Hill, and quickly finds himself in the centre of mysterious and inexplicable occurrences.

For a complete synopsis of this story, see The Lair of the White Worm (Synopsis). For characters, see White Worm characters.

Abridged 1925 version
The abridged 1925 version is a bastardization of Stoker's original 1911 work. In 1925 it was republished in an abridged version in the UK by W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd., London. The book itself is a 190 page (plus 2 pages of advertisements) hardcover with a purple cloth cover stamped on the spine and front panel in gold. The book was also partly rewritten and condensed to only 28 chapters. It is not known who did this abridgment. Further, the 1925 editor took liberties to use the word "nigger" several times, a term that was not penned by Stoker himself. Also, the 1925 editor seemed to have altered the content for the titles given by Stoker. For example, the abridged Chapter X: The Kite does not present the orginal content the way the 1911 version is (More research required to determine the original layout and source of content). When the book was first published in the US in, 1966, it was given the title The Garden of Evil by Paperback Library, New York, as a part of their Paperback Library Gothic series.

The likely reason for publishing houses to publish only a partial version of The Lair of the White Worm would be to save on printing costs: ink, paper, binding. Giving it a new title: Garden of Evil, also serves as a marketing strategy. The use of “nigger” and mixing some content, is an attempt to give it some edge. Cutting costs, a new title, and some content changes - creates a cash cow on Stoker’s work, who is long since dead. Thus, since the 1925 abridgment, all adaptions without Stoker's original forty chapters is just a rip off.

Many of the popular sites give the bastardized 28 chapter editions:
 * Sacred-texts, http://www.sacred-texts.com/goth/lww/index.htm
 * Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Lair_of_the_White_Worm
 * The University of Adelaide Library, eBooks@Adelaide, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/stoker/bram/s87l/index.html

Unabridged chapters (Complete edition)
The following chapters give the unabridged version complete with all Forty Chapters from the penmanship of Stoker, without any of the 1925 unauthorized "revisions" (download EPUB here, download PDF here).