Dracula Read online

  DRACULA

  DEDICATION

  Sam T. Weller, Shadow Showman and my literary tag team partner.

  This e-book has been specially designed so you can read both the novel and its accompanying annotations with ease. Follow the numbered links within the story to be taken to the corresponding annotation. To return to the story, follow the numbered link to the left of the annotation.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  INTRODUCTION

  “How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.” — BRAM STOKER, 1897

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  STUDY GUIDE

  COPYRIGHT

  Foreword

  BY JONATHAN MABERRY

  Dracula.

  I doubt there’s a name in horror fiction that conjures a more immediate reaction. We all know Dracula. The character, the iconic images, the legend, the stories. The odd and charming thing is that we all seem to know different versions of the Transylvanian count. He isn’t the same thing to everyone. He couldn’t be.

  He shouldn’t be.

  He never will be.

  How we perceive Dracula depends on when we first met him. For my grandmother, it was in a drafty movie house in England in the 1930s. For my favorite English teacher in high school it was in the pages of Stoker’s original novel. For my best friend growing up it was in a comic book. Today, it could be from a TV show, an audio book, a poem, song lyrics, greeting cards, action figures, video games. The list is endless.

  Dracula is everywhere.

  Absolutely everywhere.

  For me, it was in two back-to-back movies on Double Chill Theater, a late-night horror show on TV in Philadelphia. 1968, I think. I was ten years old. They showed two films. The first was Dracula with Bela Lugosi (1931). The second was Horror of Dracula with Christopher Lee (1958). Two loose adaptations of the same novel. Two totally different Draculas.

  And yet, the same.

  Since then I’ve seen countless versions of the cinematic Dracula as played by Gary Oldman, Lois Jordan, Frank Langella, Jack Palance, Carlos Villarias. So many others.

  Between that late-night double feature and most of those other movie remakes, though, I took the time to read the book.

  Turns out, the book is better.

  The Dracula in the novel is stranger, smarter, more dynamic, more tragic, less human, and far more frightening.

  The heroes are less black and white than I thought they’d be. Harker is not a dashing hero or a useless victim. Mina is a woman torn by doubts, pulled in different directions by duty and sexual attraction. Van Helsing is a total oddball. And there are rich supporting characters whose nature and presentation are nuanced and interesting, and often glossed over or abandoned in films.

  And don’t get me started on mad, tragic, fascinating Renfield.

  Because, sadly, more people watch movies than read books, fewer of the people who know Dracula know the real version. The authentic version.

  That is their loss.

  This book you’re holding is a gem. Beautifully written, rich in atmosphere and clever in its intricate plot. And it doesn’t end the way the movies do. Not at all. Stakes? Please. Although, you’ll have to read on to see what I mean.

  The annotations provided here by Mort Castle create a bridge between the vast all-sources Dracula fan-base and the wonderful source material. Annotations do that. They create connections and relevance.

  I’ve written about Dracula so many times, and about vampires in so many forms. I’ve authored five nonfiction books on the folklore of vampires and other supernatural predators. I’ve written vampire novels (my Pine Deep Trilogy), edited anthologies (V-Wars), written vampire comics (Bad Blood), penned vampire short stories, and I have other vampire projects on my to-do list.

  None of that—perhaps my entire career—would have happened had it not been for Dracula. Without that book we would not have had Salem’s Lot, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Dark Shadows, Fright Night, the Tomb of Dracula comic book, 30 Days of Night, Blade, Twilight, Near Dark, Vampire Academy, The Night Stalker, The Hunger, From Dusk Till Dawn, Let the Right One In, Blood: The Last Vampire, Nosferatu, American Vampire, I Am Legend, The Lost Boys, Fevre Dream, True Blood, and all those works by Anne Rice, P.C. Cast, Fred Saberhagen, Laurel K. Hamilton, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Kim Newman, Charlaine Harris, Darren Shan, Elizabeth Kostova, and so many, many others.

  Even Count Chocula and Sesame Street’s The Count, from whom my son learned his numbers.

  All of these are part of the legacy of Dracula.

  All of this and so much more—and so much yet to come—are the gifts given to us by Bram Stoker because of a monster story he wanted to tell in 1897.

  Endless entertainment.

  Timeless shivers.

  Deathless storytelling.

  Dracula.

  Go on, turn the page. Take a bite.

  Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning horror and thriller author, editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator, and writing teacher/lecturer. His books have been sold to more than two dozen countries. Visit him at www.jonathanmaberry.com.

  Introduction

  DRACULA: THE VAMPIRE NOVEL

  Dracula, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, is the vampire novel. It is not “arguably so” (a wishy-washy judgment much favored by academics and critics who can embrace so many points of view that they have none): It is the Bible of Bloodsuckers, Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha. It is the Epitome of Undeadness. It is the seminal book from which all others derive.

  Sure, I know and you know there were stories about vampires before Dracula. Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood by James Malcolm Rymer was published in 1847. It was a sleazy sensation in its time, but for today’s reader it has all the allure of watching the generic paper goods truck unload at Walmart.

  But Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

  Still gives us dreams of the King of the Undead.

  It did that for me when I first read it as a twenty-year-old college student, whose reading taste was more given to works by Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), John D. MacDonald (The Travis McGee series), Terry Southern (Candy—not a series) and the innovative superheroes of the rapidly revving up Marvel Universe (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, etc.).

  I finished Dracula around 3:30 in the morning and didn’t bother going to sleep.

  I would have had to click off the lights to go to sleep.

  No, thanks.

  DRACULA: THE HORROR NOVEL

  Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the foundation on which the horror fiction genre so solidly rests. Here’s what Robert Weinberg, Stoker and World Fantasy
award–winning author and editor of Horror of the 20th Century, had to say about the book on its centenary in 1997:

  “Dracula by Bram Stoker: No one movie version, all of them. They are distinctive and flashy and reflect various directors’ and actors’ interpretations of the novel. Seeing a film is like getting your news secondhand. If you want to be a horror writer, you must go to the original source material: the horror writing. Anyone who dreams of being a horror writer must read Dracula. The book, though overwritten and melodramatic, is filled with powerful images. The action scenes are fast and furious, the horror intense and replete with strong descriptions. Dracula, though written a century ago, still moves well. It stands as the most important book ever written in the horror genre.”

  Let that sink in one more time … the most important book ever written in the horror genre.

  Hey, what about Frankenstein?

  Of course I have read it. So many important fundamental science-fiction premises. So spiritual, so metaphysical, so philosophical.

  So … boring.

  The characters of Mary Shelley’s novel are all frustration-free monologists. Chief of them is the monster, who views himself as a stitched-together Hamlet endlessly soliloquizing variations on To Be or Not to Be. Yes, Frankenstein is a classic. It certainly meets Mark Twain’s definition: “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” (This might be the rare case when we can definitively say, “The movie was better than the book”; in part I think that’s because the script of the 1930 film gave Boris Karloff as the monster such lines as, “Argh …” and “Uh …” and that’s it.)

  But Dracula remains eminently readable as far more than a period piece. Though Weinberg gets it right when he mentions the “overwriting,” Stoker’s prose styling of a bygone era often helps bring us into and keep us in the otherworldly realms he’s envisioned. And as for melodrama? Our literature and music and films and television—and our lives out here in RealityLand—prove that we are hardly averse to melodrama.

  DRACULA: A WORK OF LITERATURE

  “Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice.”

  —Cyril Connolly

  Sure, you read it twice because you want to. … Now, how about we read it one more time?

  I did. It was 1996, when I was editing Writing Horror, the handbook of the Horror Writers Association, from Writer’s Digest Books. I was no longer the callow college kid. I was a writer, editor, teacher. My literary heroes were Hemingway (you have to have some years to appreciate just how fine he is); James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss might well be the best modern detective novel to date); Ray Bradbury (Miss you, Mr. B, and hope you are happy in your permanent retirement home on Mars), and Flannery O’Connor (Everything That Rises Must Converge).

  I read Dracula, no longer with the eyes of a college student who hadn’t yet lived long enough to earn his reading merit badge. And, yes sir, for sure, and mighty well told: Dracula did it to me again.

  For all of the old reasons and perhaps for some new ones as well.

  DRACULA: THE POPULAR NOVEL

  A brief history: Upon its initial release in 1897, Dracula was “a modest success.” It had some positive and some negative reviews. It had decent but not spectacular sales.

  But it hung in there.

  Bram Stoker didn’t, however. He died in 1912.

  Then came F.W. Murnau’s motion picture based on Dracula: Nosferatu. Filmed in the exciting and innovative German Expressionist manner, it was brilliantly acted, with a boyish solicitor, portrayed by Gustav von Wangenheim, taking an ultraweird coach ride to a castle in Transylvania’s Carpathian Mountains. Here he finds his sinister host, a tall, rat-featured nobleman named … Count Orlok.

  How’s that again?

  Yeah, you heard me right. Count Orlock, because Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation! A few changes: The novel’s “Jonathan Harker” is now “Thomas Hutter,” “Mina” is “Ellen”—and voilà! What do you mean by copyright?!? This is an original!

  Not so, said the Widow Stoker, and the courts agreed.

  With the resultant publicity, interest in Dracula led to stage plays and fully licensed film adaptations, and a novel that people read and liked and returned to—and that has not been out of print since its nineteenth-century publication.

  There’s a lesson here: Authors, hold onto your rights.

  Here’s another lesson: Quality endures.

  Let’s consider briefly another popular “icon of horror”: The Phantom of the Opera. Based on Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, Le Fantome de l’Opera, the story of the tormented and diabolical musical genius Erik, who conceals his horrid face behind a mask, was first filmed in 1914, but in 1925 the Phantom went big-time in the spectacular Universal production: Technicolor and spot color, elaborate sets, a score for full orchestra by Gustav Ludwig Wilhelm Hinricks, and starring the Man of a Thousand Faces, Lon Chaney! The film was a decided “10” on the popularity scale.

  Since then, there have many other film and television adaptations, ranging in quality from superb to stupid, and I can recall a 1986 musical by Charles Hart, Richard Stilgoe, and a guy named Andrew Lloyd Webber. The musical is the reigning most financially successful “entertainment event” ever.

  And Le Fantome de l’Opera by Gaston Leroux? It sold poorly when it was published in the first decade of the last century. It’s been in and out of print over the years, and today, in either the original French or translation, critics agree: It’s a lousy book. The characters are cardboard contrivances and the plot springs from the premise, “Every day is anything-can-happen day!” The novel is read nowadays only by completest fans of the musical, who believe they owe it to Mr. Webber and Co. to obtain all things Phantom, including pillow cases, coasters, tattoos, and books, and by students of literary history seeking a topic for a monograph: “Morality, Modernism, and Hats: The Role of the Semi-Colon in Leroux’s Le Fantome de l’Opera.” It’s also read by readers seeking the cynical laugh we used to get from Mystery Science Theater 3000.

  The quality of Leroux’s writing has not endured, but the quality of the story has. Like Dracula himself, a quality story does not die easily.

  DRACULA: THE ANNOTATED NOVEL

  An annotated novel is one for which marginal notes offer a running critical or explanatory commentary or critique, and highlight particular aspects of the work. Previous annotated editions of Dracula have provided enlightenment and analysis of the historical setting and characters of the novel; its mythic qualities, tropes, and conventions; its connections and associations with media other than the printed page; and, of course, the psychosexual dynamics (just wild and aberrant and orgyesque!), which were necessarily disguised in accordance with the standards of Victorian Virtue. Given Stoker’s frequent mention of culinary concerns (he has high praise for paprika!), The Delectable Dracula: A Foodie’s Guide to Bram Stoker’s Novel might well someday appear on the New York Times Best-seller List.

  But this book is something new in the annotated novel field. I am both proud and happy to give you … A Writer’s Dracula!

  But before we examine Stoker’s text, let’s take a look at a few of his front-matter elements. First, the title. We know the importance of a title in attracting the public. The name Dracula might have provided the British reader of 1897 a vague sense of “something foreign.” That might have lead to some degree of reader grab—for this was the grand era of England exploring (and exploiting) other countries and their cultures, and tales of brave British explorers in exotic climes had more than a niche vogue. Rudyard Kipling was another author who knew his audience and became a great success by exploring the strange and the foreign in his stories.

  Of course, conventional publishing wisdom (market- and marketeering-driven) might well have said at the time, “Dracula? Nobody knows what that means. How’s about The Vampire Count?”

  Which brings us to our subtitle. The job of a subtitle is to supply additional information, to amp up re
ader grab by providing clues to the story. In the original subtitle, Bram Stoker tells us Dracula is “A Mystery Story.” He does not tell us it is “A Tale of the Supernatural” or “A Horror Story” or “A Novel of Sensation.” In his time, such novels and genres existed, but most were (or at least were equated with) the so-called “Penny Dreadfuls,” a term describing not only their lurid contents but too often the craft level of the writing. They decidedly were not meant for the literary minded. Mysteries, however, explored intellectual and even moral concerns.

  Thus this subtitle declares Stoker’s Dracula a work of literature.

  Next, Stoker starts to establish the novel’s credibility with his note just before the table of contents in his book (as we’ve included in the Table of Contents in this book). He claims that “the Gospel of Dracula” did not have to wait hundreds of years to be written and compiled; this book presents contemporary up-to-the-minute accounts of the people (characters) “who were there.”

  Stoker clearly understands that fiction must be credible; that is, a lie that can be believed. That’s because no one wants to be lied to. When reading a story a reader must be able to say, “Yes, given these circumstances, this could really happen.” And so, Stoker needs to employ every possible trick in the literary legerdemain lexicon to bring on the horror that is Dracula.

  Looking at Dracula’s make-up, we see that the novel employs an epistolary format. Indeed, for those who wish to impress with their knowledge of literary terms, Dracula is a “polylogic epistolary novel,” with the requisite “three or more characters” giving us their accounts of events in letters, journal entries, newspaper stories, and even dictated phonograph recordings.

  The epistolary novel had fallen out of favor by the time Stoker was writing Dracula. But Stoker was already a veteran writer by that time, and he saw the possibilities of this point of view.