A Review By Tamsin

If you loved the Twilight trilogy and are hooked on the House of Night series, then please give this old demon a chance: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the novel that inspired the brood of vampires that now lurk on our bookshelves, and it remains as readable today as it was when it was first published in 1897, when it became an instant best seller. It was published in paperback quickly, and still sells well today. It has inspired many films from the early German cinematic masterpiece Nosferatu, to the wonderfully cheesy Hammer Horror films of the 1970s and the more recent interpretation by Francis Ford Coppola that established Gary Oldman’s vampire as a perfect romantic anti-hero.

The novel is written in the form of short diary extracts and letters that tell of the vampire Count Dracula; the story involves hypnotism, spectral black dogs and is generally replete with occult practices. When estate agent Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help his aristocratic client, Count Dracula, in the purchase of property in England, he makes horrifying discoveries in his clients castle. While he is being tormented by ghostly, half-dressed female vampires, disturbing incidents start to develop back in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked on the sands of Whitby and the only survivor is a huge black dog that is seen running off to the Abbey remains, strange puncture marks appear on the neck on a young woman and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the arrival of his ‘Master’.

This rightly deserves its place on our Classics shelves as a masterpiece of Gothic Horror; it probes uncomfortably into questions of sanity, love and death and shines a little light into the darkest corners of human sexuality and imagination.