Bram Stoker had colorful stories ready for those who asked about the origins of his novel Dracula . By one account, he fell ill after eating shellfish, and dreamed of his vampire villain. In an even more dramatic anecdote, Stoker recalled a meeting in New York with future President Teddy Roosevelt, who offered an idea for scintillating story: “why don’t you make your main character a supernatural criminal?”
Literary historians have their own theories about the real-life role model for the un-dead vampire. Some have aimed to link the malevolent Count back to Stoker’s friend and associate, actor Henry Irving, who shared many physical attributes with Dracula. Others have traced Stoker’s vampire back to a historical figure, Vlad the Impaler—a 15th century Transylvanian nobleman whose patrynomic was Dragwlya or, if you prefer, Dracula . This was no doubt the source of the name Stoker assigned to his archfiend, but the attributes and mythos of his notorious fictional character were probably constructed from a variety of sources. These may have included early vampire stories such as John Polidori’s "The Vampyre," James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire and Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla"; works of folklore such as Emily Gerard's essay "Transylvanian Superstitions" (1885) or W. Henry Jones and Lewis L. Kropf’s The Folk-Tales of the Magyars (1889); Charles Boner’s 1865 guide to Transylvania; and William Wilkinson’s 1820 study An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia .
Or, put another way, Bram Stoker was a careful man, who kept track of the details. Even before he wrote Dracula , he demonstrated these skills as a civil servant, theater manager, and personal aide to Henry Irving. Or one need merely look at Stoker’s first book, a less than scintillating, but carefully compiled study entitled The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879). We should hardly be surprised that this same author did his homework before writing Dracula.
You probably think that this methodical, detail-oriented approach might work for a civil servant, but not for a horror author. Horror cannot be approached in tiny increments, but requires big, bold effects, at least if you judge by current- day efforts. We need buckets of blood, armies of zombies, platoons of poltergeists. Yet if this is your assumption, you would be wrong. And Stoker’s novel Dracula is all the proof you need. True, this book moves forward with all deliberate speed—legal jargon for slowly, in case you didn't know. Everybody gets delayed repeatedly in this book, not just Van Helsing and the other vampire hunters, but even Dracula himself. The chess game they play with each other is filled with feints and counter-feints, bluffs and rebuffs, misdirection and misperception. The action, such as there is in this book, is spooned out in tiny spoonfuls. But the suspense never dissipates, rather builds. The catharsis we seek is intensified by Stoker’s careful layering technique.
I hardly expected this. I came to Dracula , the novel, with low expectations, filled with familiar ideas drawn from low-budget vampire movies and pop culture treatments of the undead. I thus came anticipating clichés. Unwitting host : "Count Dracula, would you like a glass of wine?" Dracula (in thick accent) : "I never drink wine!" But the effect of reading this book was much different than what I expected. Instead of encountering tired formulas, I felt as if I were seeing this story with fresh eyes, and a new appreciation of its inherent creepiness, a mixture of aberrant psychology, trauma center drama in the transfusion room, and dark eroticism where no safe words exist to limit the danger. Stoker could hardly have achieved this if he had served up slash and dash action. Instead we are lured into the depths of this book, lulled into credulity by the meticulous realism of the details, and the oh-so-gradual manner in which Stoker alerts us to the full scope of the horror surrounding us.
Yes, horror can work the most marvelous effects in just this way. After all, no haunted house is scarier than your own home, the secluded place where you have just locked the doors, on the lazy assumption that all is normal and safe. And Stoker repeatedly violates our sense of safety in this book, allowing dark forces to enter into the most vigilantly protected asylums; indeed, in some instances, they find their way into an actual asylum, where patients are treated and kept safely under lock and key. But this is merely emblematic of the root level anxiety of Dracula , a novel in which the safe, secluded places—in our heart, in our home—are repeatedly violated. This is a powerful effect, but cannot be rushed. Stoker understands this, and from the opening pages of his novel, he builds his effects with the care of a hunter laying an elaborate trap for his prey.
There are many surprises here for readers who come to the novel with expectations drawn from on-screen depictions of Dracula. First and foremost, you will be shocked by how rarely the vampire actually shows up during the course of the narrative. By my estimate, he appears in the flesh on only around 15% of the pages. And even when he does enter a scene, it is often for a mere cameo shot. He prefers to tease his victims, and by extension the reader. But he is all the more feared for the faux reticence. When he does act, he does so suddenly, and fiercely, and without compunction. As such, he is the most dangerous of all adversaries, much more so than those blustery opponents who immediately themselves launch into the fray.
You may also be surprised by the high tech trappings of this novel. Stoker published his book in 1897, and goes out of his way to include the latest advances of his day. We find the phonograph playing a prominent part in the story—even though very few people owned, or had even had encountered, this device in Victorian days. We also find reference to the London Underground, to modern medicines and medical techniques (notably transfusions, which were dangerous and rarely attempted until the identification of blood types during the early 20th century), to manifold (a predecessor of carbon paper), to portable typewriters, and other advances of the Victorian era. This assortment of gadgetry may seem strange, at first reading. After all, the Dracula story seems more like a myth from the ancient past than a modern urban legend. But Stoker realizes that the horror is intensified if it can co-exist with the latest manifestations of science and rationality. A vampire from long ago Transylvania, is hardly as frightening as the bloodsucker who may be seated next to us on the subway.
The main thrust of Stoker’s plot is to emphasize this shift from the folkloric to the everyday. Count Dracula, we learn early in this book, wants to move to London. The book opens with the diary entries of Jonathan Harker, a British solicitor who travels to Transylvania to assist the Count on his relocation plans. He gradually—and everything horrible happens gradually in the gruesome book—comes to realize that Dracula plans to pump him for information and assistance, along with English conversation lessons, but will then pump him in other more literal ways. He needs to escape, but Dracula has made him a virtual prisoner in the confines of his isolated castle.
When the action shifts to England, Dracula’s range of options—and potential victims—widens. He is protected, moreover, by the rationalism of the age. In Transylvania, the suspicious peasantry were on the lookout for him, but in the midst of a booming metropolis, no one suspects the presence of a vampire. Yet in time, a leading medical expert, Abraham Van Helsing, is called from his native Amsterdam to consult on a peculiar case. He concludes—yes, gradually!—that the only plausible explanation is one that none of his colleagues would believe, namely an outbreak of vampirism in Merrie England! Van Helsing now faces a triple challenge: he must protect his patient, convince the non-believers whose assistance he requires, and above all, he must track down and destroy Count Dracula. Each of these is fraught with danger, and a high likelihood of failure.
The other unexpected twist in this novel is primarily a technical matter of perspective and pacing. The entire book is presented in the form of letters, memorandums, news reports, diary entries and other documents. If you mapped out the narrative on a flow chart, it would look like a maze. Stoker moves back and forth in chronological sequence. He shifts narrative voice. He presents key facts and plot elements from both trustworthy and deceived narrators. At times, incidents are explained only a hundred or more pages after they initially occur. He even mixes in a malapropisms and clumsy phrases into Van Helsing’s speech patterns, no doubt to emphasize his foreign origins but also with a gleeful desire to throw one more obstacle into the reader’s path. In other words, the structural complexity here is far beyond what you might expect from a work of genre fiction. And a work with so many moving parts could easily falter, as the story shifts from narrator to narrator, like the baton in a relay race. One drop, once false move, and everything could come to a sudden halt.
But Stoker never falters. The reader follows eagerly, and each transition in this ever-changing story seems to amplify the suspense, and intensify the mounting sense of dread that pervades these pages. In the final stages of the story, all the narratives converge—from four different directions. At this point, we will receive the catharsis that we sought. And here the methodical Bram Stoker shows that he can also dispense with formalities, and resolve all matters with a bloody and brutal elegance.
We are almost sorry to see Count Dracula leave us at this point. He has lived up to his end of the bargain, serving as a formidable and frightening adversary. And we are just as sad to say farewell to Van Helsing, who ranks among the most intriguing heroes of nineteenth century adventure fiction. But even if Stoker left them behind, others have stepped in to fill the gap. Dracula has risen from the grave again and again, most notably in some 200 movies, and a host of other bloodsucking protagonists have developed their own franchises. But if you haven’t read the original Dracula, let these wannabes and imitators wait. The first great vampire book is still the best.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His most recent book, Love Songs: The Hidden History , is published by Oxford University Press.