Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to the Carpathian Mountains to help Count Dracula complete the purchase of an estate near London. His host is courteous but strange, and Harker gradually realises he is a prisoner in a castle where the Count crawls down walls and three spectral women haunt the rooms.
The story then moves to England, where Harker's fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra become entangled in a series of disturbing events after a ship runs aground at Whitby with its crew dead. Lucy's suitors, the asylum doctor John Seward, the American Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood, call in the Dutch professor Abraham Van Helsing, whose knowledge of folklore and science may be their only defence.
Told through diaries, letters, newspaper cuttings and phonograph records, the novel creates suspense from fragments that the characters must piece together. It drew on Eastern European vampire legend and Victorian anxieties about sexuality, disease, immigration and modern technology, and its count became the template for the vampire in popular culture.
Book details
| Author | Bram Stoker |
|---|---|
| First published | 1897 |
| Original language | English |
| Genre | Horror |
| Type | Fiction |
| Pages (approx.) | 418 |
| Setting | Transylvania, Whitby and London, 1890s |
Themes
- Good and evil
- Sexuality
- Fear of the foreign
- Science versus superstition
- Modernity
Who should read it
Horror fans who want the original vampire novel and readers who enjoy stories pieced together from documents.
If you liked this, try
- Frankenstein
- Carmilla
- The Picture of Dorian Gray