The third in Penguin's new Speculative Fiction Special series is a novel that many have read and an awful lot more know from its countless adaptations. It's accompanied in this edition by a foreword by Robert Eggers, director of the latest version of 'Nosferatu', which was released in 2024, and an introduction by Karen Winstead, a professor at Ohio State who specialises in mediaeval literature and popular culture. She also compiled a reading list that's not much of a surprise but is welcome nonetheless.

I've read 'Dracula' before, but not since my days of reading on a Jornada while standing on trains, one hand on a support bar, the other thumbing the pages with a convenient wheel that I've been missing for the past quarter of a century. Maybe I'll pull that out of whatever box it's in and bring it fresh life. My tablet is too heavy and awkward to be comfortable. It was good to read through it afresh, on this side of another couple of decades of cultural exploration and a couple of moments surprised me all over again.

You all know the story, of course, but likely more from its many film adaptations than this original novel, which they don't necessarily hold true to. For instance, we start out with Jonathan Harker, English solicitor, on assignment in Transylvania, as we expect, but after he makes it up the Borgo Pass to Count Dracula's castle, we learn that this infamous vampire boasts bushy eyebrows and a long white moustache. I'm not sure that's ever made it into the movies. It doesn't take very long for him to lizard crawl around the exterior walls of the castle either, something that didn't arrive in the movies until modern special effects made it viable.

What we're reading at this point is Harker's journal, which is written in old-fashioned prose with a penchant for long paragraphs that often span multiple pages, but which is also surprisingly quick and easy to read. It has a wonderfully uneasy build to it too, from superstitious locals attempting to warn him off his mission to the howling of wolves at midnight. He realises that the Count has a lack of reflection and is drawn to bloodlust at the sight of the red stuff. He encounters the Brides, only to be saved by the Count, at least for now. He throws them a live baby as a distraction, later calling a pack of wolves down from the hills to devour its mother. It's brutal stuff.

Eventually, we switch location as the Count memorably arrives in Whitby on the 'Demeter'. Here, I was a little surprised to find that it slides neatly in between the two piers to beach safely at the heart of the town. That's a neat trick for a boat with no living crew, the only human on board the dead captain lashed to the wheel. I was also surprised that the following scenes in Whitby mostly unfold at St. Mary's Church, at the top of the hundred and ninety-nine steps, rather than Whitby Abbey. The Abbey is mentioned, but St. Mary's far more often and Lucy and Mina sit on graves at the church, even being told by locals that the cliff was eroding even by 1897, with buried remains falling into the sea now and again. That's still happening today.

This story is told by many people and Stoker ensures a strong delineation between their written or spoken voices. The primary characters are all well-spoken, of course, except for Prof. Abraham Van Helsing, who's Dutch and struggles somewhat with English as a second language. However, a selection of supporting characters give forth in heavily accented dialects, most overtly Yorkshire and Cockney, but Quincey Morris has a Texan drawl. Van Helsing is awkward and increasingly long-winded, and Dr. John Seward is verbose but more detailed, as a medical man. Both Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker are more to the point in their journals, while Mina and Lucy Westenra can be downright bubbly in letters to each other.

From Castle Dracula to Whitby to Purfleet, where Carfax turns out to be an abandoned mansion right next door to Dr. Seward's insane asylum, where a certain R. M. Renfield is a patient. He was easily my biggest surprise here, not because I don't remember him—he's usually the single most memorable character in any version, other than the Count himself, and this is no exception—but because he stands out so much. I couldn't help but think that there were vampires before Dracula and even learned nemeses before Van Helsing, but there doesn't seem to have been a familiar in any fictional take on the genre before Renfield. Some quick research backs that up. He's original and he seems it, standing out as much here as Gollum did in my revisit of 'The Hobbit' last month.

He's usually downplayed in movie adaptations to outrageous freak, while Van Helsing gets all the best scenes opposite his nemesis, Count Dracula. Here, the professor is an old man who struggles with the English language and even more to get to the point. In fact, it isn't just his dialogue that takes forever to get to the point, he prevaricates in everything. I kept remembering the vibrant Peter Cushing getting down to business with no messing about. Cross. Stake. Hammer. Go. In this book, Van Helsing prefers interminable explanation, waiting for permission and then delaying for a couple of days before doing anything. He was surely nobody's favourite character in 1897.

Also, as learned as he is, he's still reliant on 19^th-century data. One detail that struck me here was how he administered blood transfusions to help keep Lucy alive, after the Count got in at night to suck her blood, something we only realise in hindsight. Firstly, it's Lucy's fiancé, Arthur Holmwood, Lord Godalming. Then it's Seward, then Morris and finally Van Helsing himself. Four people, all of unknown blood types. They could have killed her before they ever had a chance to save her. Well, it turns out that Karl Landsteiner didn't discover blood types until 1900, calling them A, B and C, the C later becoming O, winning a Nobel Prize for his trouble. Colleagues added AB in 1902. So it's fair that Bram Stoker had no idea about such things and neither did his fictional doctor.

Another surprise is that Lucy, after becoming one of the Un-Dead, with a hyphen in this book, can enter her tomb through the tiniest of cracks in the door. It's not quite travelling through solids, as Carmilla did in J. Sheridan Le Fanu's novella of that name, which Penguin also recently published in this series and I reviewed a couple of months ago, but it comes pretty close. It's really extreme size manipulation, which she masters pretty quickly. After all, Dracula can turn into a bat or just a cloud of mist.

One more surprise is how capable Mina is. Van Helsing is clearly sexist, but even he has to knuckle down and listen to Mina eventually. She's very much the picture of the new woman, who types up all this material, even from Seward's phonograph recordings on wax cylinders, and collates all the remaining ephemera together to comprise this account. Her husband provides a little help on the latter, but mostly it’s her work. She often has knowledge that the men don't, which is sometimes a crucial detail, and often has the best judgement too, connecting dots and suggesting next steps. I would suggest that she's just as brave as the various brave men around her too. All in all, she feels a lot closer to protagonist than I remembered.

And finally, the end, when we finally reach it, happens so quickly that's almost a letdown. Stoker's built us up with wonderfully atmospheric scenes in Transylvania and Whitby, only to promptly slow it all down, sometimes to a crawl, in Purfleet and then built us up again slowly but very surely to a powerful pace and then, well, it's done. Clearly Stoker had never heard of a boss battle and, while that's largely a good thing, he certainly made me want a little more from a finalé. This becomes a clear case of the chase being better than the catch.

In fact, the pacing made me wonder if this story, which runs four-hundred and thirty pages in this Penguin edition, would play better as a duology of two shorter novels running a hundred and fifty pages each. Everything up to Purfleet is perfect as is, but some material could be cut from there to maintain at least a sedate pace in between the glorious scenes with Renfield, and the first half would end after the final death of Lucy and the decision to go on to face her former master. That journey would comprise the second book, which would remain mostly intact but lose a little of the build and gain a little finalé.

But hey, that's for a parallel universe. We have what we have and 'Dracula' in its original form is a pioneering work. It wasn't the only vampire novel of 1897, Florence Marryat's very different 'The Blood of the Vampire' being released that year too, as Winstead points out in her reading list. It's about a psychic vampire of mixed race who kills unintentionally. I haven't read it but should. If my memory holds, both were outsold that year by a lesser known horror novel, 'The Beetle' by Robert Marsh, which I have read and thoroughly enjoyed. Of course, as the years passed, 'Dracula' quickly took over and all vampires in fiction are categorised as before it and after it.

That's it for Penguin's Speculative Fiction Special series for now. It's been fantastic to reacquaint myself with 'The Vampyre', 'Carmilla' and 'Dracula', a trio of pivotal nineteenth-century vampires. I enjoyed 'The Gilda Stories,' too; an anomalous but fascinating take on the genre from much later. Next up it seems are 'Jirel of Joiry' and 'I am Legend', both favourites of mine. The latter fits with the vampire genre, of course, though a very different take again, while the 'Jirel of Joiry' stories were sword and sorcery, suggesting a whole new spin on the series. I'm looking forward to them. ~~ Hal C F Astell