In Her Poems, Evil Lurks And Skin Crawls Karen Porter's Mind Wanders To That World Where Dracula Walks

He walks in the zone of shadows,

a demi-god of death and

bloody ritual steeped

beyond the memories of man,

falling back into the edge of chaos, to the

time of before there was before . . .

- Karen Porter, ``Dream Creeper''

The words conjure the spirit of the vampire - a figure of evil that has fascinated for centuries, and perhaps especially at that time of year when the days grow short and the shadows long, the otherworldly season of All Hallows' Eve.

But from where and whom these lines of poetry? They further conjure the author wandering a wind-driven beach by an ancient sea, turning the words over and over, glancing back through the mist at castle ruins.

Except the ruins in this case would be the old vehicles in Joe's Junkyard, just up the road from the Atlantic County 4-H Fairgrounds on Route 50. Publishers may wonder where the next Anne Rice is lurking, but they probably wouldn't think of Mays Landing, N.J.

But the Atlantic County community is indeed home to the poet behind the darkly romantic lines. Karen Porter, 38, lives in the Laureldale section of Mays Landing. By day she is engaged in the unromantic job of helping to run her family's liquor store. But she spends her evenings writing poetry, and her blend of humor, horror, lyricism, romanticism and Gothic elements has met with success.

``It seems like just about every month I'm getting something published,'' she said in a telephone conversation. ``I send my stuff all over. In fact, I just got a poem accepted in an English publication.''

``Dream Creeper,'' whose protagonist is the chief vampire himself, took first prize in a contest sponsored by the Transylvania Society of Dracula to mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of Bram Stoker's classic novel.

``I don't usually write this way, with a specific topic as a jumping-off point, but this was right up my alley,'' she said.

``I have a book on the folklore and history of Dracula that has photographs of the ruins of what was supposedly Castle Dracula,'' she said. Contrary to popular belief, Porter explained, Dracula was not from the Transylvania region of Romania, but from adjacent Wallachia. This is where Vlad Tepes (``the Impaler'') of the family Dracul - whom scholars identify as the historical Dracula - lived.

The moody photographs inspired ``Dream Creeper,'' which Porter said took just an hour.