Acting on behalf of his firm of solicitors, Jonathan Harker travels to the Carpathian Mountains to finalize the sale of England's Carfax Abbey to Transylvanian noble Count Dracula. Little does he realize that, in doing so, he endangers all that he loves. For Dracula is one of the Un-Dead--a centuries-old vampire who sleeps by day and stalks by night, feasting on the blood of his helpless victims. Once on English soil, the count sets his sights on Jonathan's circle of associates, among them his beloved wife Mina. To thwart Dracula's evil designs, Jonathan and his friends will have to accept as truth the most preposterous superstitions concerning vampires, and in the company of legendary vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, embark on an unholy adventure for which even their worst nightmares have not prepared them. First published in 1897, Bram Stoker's Dracula established the ground rules for virtually all vampire fiction written in its wake.
CONTRIBUTOR(S): Matt Kirkland (Contributor)
PUBLISHER: Studio Kirkland
YEAR: 1897
LENGTH: 440 pages
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Classics, Horror
RECOMMENDED: Yes
Queer Rep Summary: No canon queer rep.
I read this as part of the Dracula Daily emails from May to November in 2023. This is an annual event and will likely continue to be available in the future.
Dracula is a book which has been around for over a century, and it's a story that has known problems of racism and antisemitism baked into its premise and its execution. What I primarily want to rate here is my experience of reading the book through Dracula Daily, where everything is emailed in order based on the date of the piece of writing, rather than being in the order Bram Stoker envisioned. I, as a person, got kind of stressed out by knowing that this book was going to take months to read. On the other hand, since I don't have a strong sense of the passage of time, it was very cool to get more of a idea of how long the characters were waiting for news or how very long all of this travel took. When the characters were waiting for word or would put in their diaries that they were still waiting on a letter or didn't have information they needed, that resonated more because I also had been waiting. Or, occasionally, I was able to read a letter that was written but had not yet reached the intended recipient.
Overall, I enjoyed it as an experience, but if you are looking for a vampire story to read there are ones with fewer old-timey bigotries. The emails definitely are an easy way to get the epistolary feel, if that's what you want.
Graphic/Explicit CW for grief, blood, violence, death.
Moderate CW for racism, racial slurs, sexism, antisemitism, confinement, forced institutionalization, injury detail, medical content, murder, animal death.
Minor CW for sexual content, pregnancy, child death, suicide.
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