Dracula
Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to a castle in the Carpathian mountains to help a Transylvanian nobleman buy a house in London. The Count is charming, but there are no mirrors, the doors are locked, and he never eats. Soon the Count is in England, Lucy is growing pale, and Professor Van Helsing must gather a band of friends to hunt him. Told in diaries, letters and newspaper cuttings: the vampire story that started it all. By Bram Stoker (1897). A public-domain classic.
Content warnings: Violence · Death
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How it begins 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 later-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.(Kept in shorthand.) Keep reading →About this story
A young English solicitor, Jonathan Harker, travels to a castle in Transylvania to help a nobleman, Count Dracula, buy a house in London. He begins to notice things that do not add up: the Count is never seen to eat, the doors are locked at night, and the castle has no mirrors. Then the Count follows him to England.
Bram Stoker, an Irish writer who managed the Lyceum Theatre in London, published it in 1897. The book is told through letters, diary entries, newspaper cuttings and ship’s logs, which gives it a feeling of real evidence being pieced together. Stoker did not invent the vampire, but this is the book that fixed the image most people have of one.
- Themes
- Fear of the foreign, desire, modern science against old superstition
- Good for
- A long, atmospheric read; anyone who knows the films and wants the original
- Worth noticing
- How the format, journals and letters, makes the horror feel more believable.
Chapters
- 1Jonathan Harker’s Journal26 min · 31 Oct
- 2Jonathan Harker’s Journal24 min · 31 Oct
- 3Jonathan Harker’s Journal25 min · 31 Oct
- 4Jonathan Harker’s Journal26 min · 31 Oct
- 5Letters—Lucy and Mina16 min · 31 Oct
- 6Mina Murray’s Journal25 min · 31 Oct
- 7Cutting from “The Dailygraph,” 8 August25 min · 31 Oct
- 8Mina Murray’s Journal28 min · 31 Oct
- 9Mina Murray’s Journal26 min · 31 Oct
- 10Mina Murray’s Journal26 min · 31 Oct
- 11Lucy Westenra’s Diary23 min · 31 Oct
- 12Dr. Seward’s Diary32 min · 31 Oct
- 13Dr. Seward’s Diary29 min · 31 Oct
- 14Mina Harker’s Journal28 min · 31 Oct
- 15Dr. Seward’s Diary26 min · 31 Oct
- 16Dr. Seward’s Diary20 min · 31 Oct
- 17Dr. Seward’s Diary25 min · 31 Oct
- 18Dr. Seward’s Diary31 min · 31 Oct
- 19Jonathan Harker’s Journal25 min · 31 Oct
- 20Jonathan Harker’s Journal26 min · 31 Oct
- 21Dr. Seward’s Diary27 min · 31 Oct
- 22Jonathan Harker’s Journal24 min · 31 Oct
- 23Dr. Seward’s Diary25 min · 31 Oct
- 24Dr. Seward’s Phonograph Diary, spoken by Van Helsing28 min · 31 Oct
- 25Dr. Seward’s Diary28 min · 31 Oct
- 26Dr. Seward’s Diary32 min · 31 Oct
- 27Mina Harker’s Journal35 min · 31 Oct