The Lair of the White Worm

Anyone who comes from Dracula to The Lair of the White Worm, expecting a nutty book, would still be surprised and baffled because of how nutty it is.
Bram Stoker’s good at captivating our attention—we want to know what happens, how it ends, what the mystery is. But it’s a crazy, baffling, badly plotted, and incoherent book, and I haven’t even finished it. 
Here’s the summary: our main character Adam Salton from Australia comes to England to visit his grand-uncle Richard Salton. There he is introduced to Mr Salton’s friend, Sir Nathaniel de Salis. Together Mr Salton and Sir Nathaniel, but especially the latter, introduce Adam to the area, show him the different sites such as Castra Regis (the castle of Caswall family) and Diana’s Grove, tell him the history and traits of the Caswall family and the legends of the area. 
Then Edgar Caswall, the new heir of the castle, comes home to claim the place after generations. The book so far has 3 villains: Edgar Caswall, his African servant Oolanga, and Lady Arabella March of Diana’s Grove, all of whom share a chilling lack of human feeling. 
The book is filled with myths, legends; pseudo-sciences such as physiognomy; and other crackpot ideas such as Voodoo, hypnotising, inherited personality traits, and so-called “moral metabolism”: 

“Strangely, as [Edgar Caswall] yielded to this demoralising process, he seemed to be achieving a new likeness to Oolanga. […] the thing which puzzled [Adam] most was that the forbidding qualities in the African, which had at first evoked his attention and his disgust, remained the same. Had it been that the two men had been affected, one changing with the other by slow degrees—a sort of moral metabolism,—he would have better and more easily understood it. Transmutation of different bodies is, in a way, more understandable than changes in one body that have no equivalent equipoise in the other. The idea was recurrent to him that perhaps when a nature has reached its lowest point of decadence it loses the faculty of change of any kind.” (Ch.13) 

See what I mean? Madman Bram Stoker is.    
The book is also filled with racism. Lots of it. I feel slightly annoyed but can get over the depiction of women—innocent, helpless, dove-like creatures who swoon at the slightest thing, but the racism is quite something else. 
Behold Oolanga’s introduction: 

“But presently his African servant approached him, and at once their thoughts changed to a larger toleration. For by comparison with this man his face seemed to have a certain nobility hitherto lacking. Caswall looked indeed a savage—but a cultured savage. In him were traces of the softening civilisation of ages—of some of the higher instincts and education of man, no matter how rudimentary these might be. But the face of Oolanga, as his master at once called him, was pure pristine, unreformed, unsoftened savage, with inherent in it all of the hideous possibilities of a lost, devil-ridden child of the forest and the swamp—the lowest and most loathsome of all created things which were in some form ostensibly human.” (Ch.4) 

That’s bad, no? It gets worse. Bram Stoker places Oolanga and Lady Arabella next to each other: 

“The girl of the Caucasian type, beautiful, Salon blonde, with a complexion of milk and roses, high-bred, clever, serene of nature. The other negroid of the lowest type; hideously ugly, wanting in all the mental and moral faculties—in fact, so brutal as to be hardly human.” (Ch.5) 

That’s convenient: the author wants a human who is not fully human, a villain who is low, base, savage, a “child of the forest and the swamp”, so he creates an African character. 

“Briefly, this is his history. He was originally a witch-finder—about as low an occupation as exists amongst aboriginal savages. Then he got up in the world and became an Obi-man, which gives an opportunity to wealth via blackmail.  Finally, he reached the highest honour in hellish service. He became a user of Voodoo, which seems to be a service of the utmost baseness and cruelty. I was told some of his deeds of cruelty, which are simply sickening. They made me long for an opportunity of helping to drive him back to hell. You might think to look at him that you could measure in some way the extent of his vileness; but it would be a vain hope. Monsters such as he is belong to an earlier and more rudimentary stage of barbarism. He is in his way a clever fellow—for a nigger; but is none the less dangerous or the less hateful for that.” (Ch.7) 

Whoa. 
I do take the time into account (The Lair of the White Worm was published in 1911), but that is still quite hard to stomach. I mean, disgusting. 
I continued reading the book to get to the end of the story, but that never quite gets out of the way.  
The plot, however, becomes more confusing and less coherent. I’m currently on chapter 14, and chapter 12 is when Bram Stoker starts to lose control and the story takes a random turn and moves in a different direction. Imagine, the story up to chapter 11 has been about the 3 villains, Edgar Caswall’s courtship of Lilla Watford (under Adam’s watchful eyes), and the mystery of the snakes and Adam’s dead mongooses. All of a sudden, in chapter 12, Bram Stoker mixes in Hitchcock’s The Birds, and introduces the odd solution of a kite in shape of a great hawk, which helps shut up the birds but at the same time also brings about a dreadful silence and soundless gloom among the cattle and a depression among the people in the area. He also writes about Edgar Caswall developing a mad obsession with the kite—watching it, associating human qualities with it, trying to communicate with it. 
Then, suddenly, abruptly, and very randomly, Bram Stoker changes direction again—to the collection of curios, mummies, and weapons in the castle, and to a mysterious chest. 
What in the fresh hell is going on? 
I have no clue. This is really bad, a hotchpotch of insane ideas. But I have to read it to the end.