Stoker’s first readers were, on the whole, enthusiastic (though the reviewer in the influential Atheneum magazine gave it only a lukewarm and qualified endorsement). Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of the swashbuckling classic The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), wrote to Stoker, “Your vampires robbed me of sleep for nights” (Belford, p. 275); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of the few fictional characters that has rivaled Count Dracula in popular appeal, thought it “the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years. It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax” (Belford, p. 275). Contemporary readers tended to agree; what is more, they seemed to find nothing sexually odd about Dracula-or if they did, they forbore to remark upon the fact, for to do so would have been to admit to a greater sexual knowingness than was considered acceptable at the time.

Like Wilkie Collins, whose novel The Woman in White, a run-away success, served as something of a prototype for suspense fiction for many years after its publication, Bram Stoker decided upon a modified epistolary format. Dracula is not a straightforward narrative but a collection of documents that, taken together, tell the tale in its entirety: journals and letters by the principal characters, transcriptions of recordings on the newfangled phonograph, newspaper clippings, even a ship’s log. The story constructed by these fragments is a rather complex one, and dramatists and filmmakers, in adapting the novel, have usually felt free to alter the plot in drastic ways, dropping major characters or amalgamating them into one another, changing the various love interests around, and generally ignoring and upsetting Stoker’s carefully built fictional edifice. In doing so they have sacrificed layers of meaning and radically changed Stoker’s original intentions.

The novel’s first narrator is Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor who travels to the wilds of Transylvania to advise a client, the mysterious Count Dracula, on the Count’s purchase of a decrepit abbey in England and his plans to move into it. In Harker’s journal we read of his increasing unease at the sinister goings-on at the castle, and soon we discover that he is in effect being held prisoner by his frightening host. During Harker’s stay at Castle Dracula he is approached by three seductive vampire maidens, but Dracula chases them away, claiming the quaking Harker as his own.

Harker manages to escape from the castle, and the scene shifts to England, where we are introduced to Mina Murray, Harker’s fiancee, and her friend Lucy Westenra. Lucy, a fragile beauty, has three suitors: Dr. Jonathan Seward, the director of a mental hospital, or sanatorium, next door to Dracula’s English abbey; Quincey Morris, an attractive American adventurer; and Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming), the most eligible of the three and the one whose proposal she decides to accept. On holiday by the sea, Lucy and Mina encounter a mysterious being whom we recognize as Dracula, now at large in England, and Lucy is attacked and bitten by him. Losing blood nightly, she begins to fade away; eventually she dies, becomes a vampire herself, and preys on small children.

Aided by a venerable doctor and wise man, Abraham Van Helsing, the principal characters go to work to undo Dracula’s evil work. Lucy’s three suitors and Van Helsing enter the undead Lucy’s tomb and truly kill her, driving a stake through her heart and decapitating her. Soon, however, Mina herself falls prey to Dracula. In a combined effort that involves ancient wisdom, modern science, good brains, and stout hearts, the group of friends finally succeeds in chasing Dracula back to his native land, killing him and hence freeing his soul from eternal torment as they have freed their friend Lucy’s.

This, very briefly summarized, is the plot. Admittedly the characters are not highly developed, but their web of mutual interactions allows Stoker to explore many sorts of relationships, sexual and otherwise, that troubled his society and himself. These nuances were discarded by later simplifying dramatists and filmmakers, who in focusing almost exclusively on Dracula and on the brilliantly realized Renfield, Dracula’s grisly apostle, have turned the story into one of mere horror spiced with occasional humor.

Stoker handled his many-layered plot capably and professionally, but it is in his use of descriptive prose that he showed, at least in this one novel out of the thirteen he produced during his lifetime, something close to genius. Here, for example, is Jonathan Harker’s first glimpse of his undead host reposing in his native earth at the Castle Dracula:

There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.... There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face.... (p. 58).

This is only one of the more dramatic examples; there are countless passages in Dracula that show the author’s unerring feeling for the strong word, the strong image, the fundamental shock.

Like his great peers, but unlike so many second-string horror writers, Stoker had a fine feeling for humor. In Dracula he uses it sparingly but to marvelous effect, making it heighten, through the rather hysterical laughter it prompts, the gruesomeness of the situation. Aside from a few crude jokes from Van Helsing (who has a punster’s propensity for remarking offhandedly that he is embarked on a “grave duty” (p.