Dracula
SynopsisPlot
Acting on behalf of his firm of solicitors, Jonathan Harker travels to the Carpathian Mountains to finalise the sale of England's Carfax Abbey to Transylvanian noble Count Dracula. Little does he realise that, in doing so, he endangers all that he loves. For Dracula is one of the Un-Dead; a centuries-old vampire who sleeps by day and stalks by night, feasting on the blood of his helpless victims. Once on English soil, the count sets his sights on Jonathan's circle of associates, among them his beloved wife Mina. To thwart Dracula's evil designs, Jonathan and his friends will have to accept as truth the most preposterous superstitions concerning vampires and in the company of legendary vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, embark on an unholy adventure for which even their worst nightmares have not prepared them.
Story
About this book
Bram Stoker's Dracula, first published in 1897, follows Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor sent to Transylvania to complete a property transaction with Count Dracula. The count has purchased Carfax Abbey in England and intends to relocate from his remote castle in the Carpathian Mountains to late nineteenth-century London. Harker gradually discovers that his host is a centuries-old vampire, a creature who survives on human blood and cannot be killed by ordinary means.
The novel is told through diary entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and telegrams rather than a single narrator. Once Dracula reaches England, he begins to target people close to Harker, including his wife Mina. A small group forms around Professor Abraham Van Helsing, a Dutch academic with knowledge of folklore and the supernatural, to track and confront the count. The story moves between locations in England and eastern Europe as the group pieces together Dracula's movements and weaknesses.
Stoker drew on Eastern European folklore about blood-drinking revenants and combined it with anxieties about foreign influence in Victorian England. The book shaped nearly every major portrayal of vampires in fiction and film that followed it.
