I think that the abridgment removed about a third of the book — cutting it from a 300-ish page novel to 200-ish. I could be more precise if I still owned my paperback copy, but that left my possession long ago.

Daughters of Darkness is a very fine film, and her post on the subject shows Ms McQuade to be a person of exceptional perspicacity. On that basis, I’ve ordered the German DVD of The Lair of the White Worm. This is not, as I previously stated, the only DVD — there is also a Region 1 version. But I’ve had very little luck with multi-region players, so I discounted that.

Thanks, Pet! You’re quite right. I think the root of us thinking of it as a short may be that (quoth Wiki) “in 1925, it was republished in a highly abridged and rewritten form. Over a hundred pages were removed, the rewritten book having only twenty-eight chapters instead of the original forty. The final eleven chapters were cut down to only five, leading some critics to complain that the ending was abrupt and inconsistent”. So still not a short story, but interestingly, it got truncated into a half-the-original-size novella (maybe? Or just a shorter novel than before…?) at one point!

Glad you enjoyed Daughters of Darkness!

I generally avoid Ken Russell films, but I was sufficiently intrigued by what you say to check The Lair of the White Worm’s availability on DVD. (I was also encouraged by the fact that you also reviewed Daughters of Darkness, a film I recently watched partly because of your Bad Rep review. You didn’t lead me astray with Daughters of Darkness — thank you for that.)

Seemingly, the only DVD of The Lair of the White Worm is German. (But the German subtitles are removable, an Amazon reviewer is helpful enough to tell me.) The German title, as well as I can read it on screen, is Der Biss Der Schlangen Frau. My German isn’t good enough to translate that apart from the final word, which is “woman” not “worm”.