91 books like Dracula

Carlo Ginzburg has written a great deal about witches and is an expert in ‘microhistory’–the archaeology of the marginalized and forgotten elements of human history.

This book is a culmination of his more academic research, in which he discusses not just witches but (importantly for me) the putative undercurrent of Central European shamanism in the witchcraft trials in Northern Italy. What does that have to do with vampires? I have long held a hypothesis that Friuli, where the benandanti (reputed to leave their bodies at night to fight witches), is a region where Slavic vampire folklore may have come into contact with Western European witchcraft beliefs.

Leslie Klinger’s annotated version of Dracula is one of the most recent editions, and it surely is the most entertaining one, suitable for readers who are no Dracula experts (yet). Some of his comments build on the (purely fictional) assumption that the Count himself had his hand in editing Stoker’s text. In a single instance, when it comes to the historical Dracula family, Klinger drops the ball, but he makes a unique contribution to Dracula Studies by comparing Dracula’s final text with that of Stoker’s typescript, found in a barn in Pennsylvania in the 1980s. His attention to geographical details greatly inspired my own research into this matter. The book comes with a number of illustrations and helpful appendixes.

Barbara Belford’s 1996 book is one of the classics in its field, next to the Stoker biographies by Harry Ludlam, Daniel Farson, and Paul Murray. With a background in journalism, Belford created a very readable introduction to Stoker’s life. Her book still is an invaluable source for fans and scholars trying to understand the making of Dracula. It is a good stepping stone for readers who would like to dive deeper later on, e.g., by studying David Skal’s more recent work, Something in the Blood. For me personally, it gave me a very colorful image of Stoker’s life and helped me better understand him as a person and an author.

This book is key to understanding the “transmediation” of Dracula: the metamorphosis of Stoker’s story by adapting it for new media, such as theatrical and movie versions. As Bram Stoker died in 1911, his widow Florence played a key role in negotiating the rights for such modifications, and fighting the pirated screen version of Nosferatu created in Germany by Prana Film. As David Skal put it, Dracula is very much a story about control, and the subsequent developments show how Bram and then Florence tried to keep the lid on the unauthorized dissemination and adaptation of the Dracula novel—but failed in the end. Highly recommended reading for all who are interested in the question of how Dracula became so popular all over the world.

Although Bram Stoker was a fiction writer presenting us with a fantastic, supernatural story, he did meticulous research in an effort to create a convincing backdrop: history, geography, psychology, vampire lore, dreaming and somnambulism, animal behavior, the history of the Devil—yes, even seamen’s yarn was the subject of Stoker’s studies. Dracula scholar Clive Leatherdale has done a superb job by tracking the novelist’s key sources, summarizing them for us and highlighting their relevance for the making of Dracula. A decade later, Leatherdale would release Bram Stoker’s Dracula Unearthed, an annotated edition of the novel. To find affordable second-hand editions of both classics, you have to search the Internet a bit, but for everyone aspiring to become a Dracula expert, both books are indispensable.

I will argue that the rapid increase in attention to the folkloric basis of the vampire legends in English-language literature is the result of the work of the late Prof. Jan Perkowski, whose book The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism changed my life. I left a fairly lucrative high-tech career to get my doctorate in Slavic Folklore at the University of Virginia, where (full disclosure) I became Perkowski’s teaching assistant.

In 2006, I was asked to write the Preface for a collection of all of Perkowski’s seminal writings on the Slavic vampire. Vampire Lore is a compendium of his complete books, as well as harder-to-obtain articles about more arcane aspects of vampire folklore, in one solid volume.

My copy is well-worn, as this volume contains not only The Darkling but two other complete volumes, including Vampires of the Slavs and Vampires, Dwarves, and Witches among the Ontario Kashubs.… show more.

Serious students of vampire folklore are aware that the motif is found all over Eastern and Central Europe. Gabor Klaniczay is a Hungarian historian whose research focuses on witches and other supernatural entities in the cultures of Austro-Hungary and its environs.

This book showed me so many things that I and other American readers get wrong. For example, most people believe that the “blood countess,” Erzebeta Bathory, drank the blood of local virgins, but Klaniczay shows that these reports were actually constructed to get her out of the way of an inheritance scheme. Klaniczay is also an expert on Central European shamanism, and this led to my assertion that vampire lore incorporates some shamanistic beliefs.

During the final phases of my dissertation research, I taught a course at the University of Virginia titled “Blood and Sacrifice.” Girard's book validated my hypothesis that the vampire figure is a scapegoat. It discusses topics such as ‘stereotypes of persecution,’ ‘violence and magic,’ and others. I used Girard’s writings on sacrifice to bolster my claim that societies need to construct scapegoats (such as vampires or witches) to avoid creating internal social chaos and blame.

Though his approach is that of a literary scholar, his erudition creates a very thorough understanding of a socio-structural phenomenon that has existed as long in human history as we have had writing, and certainly longer.

The most iconic and somehow most misrepresented vampire story of all time. I read this book because it was iconic and for no other reason. It was not long before I began to see this book's Christian themes and messages. Though the book may not be explicitly Christian, the influences and messages are most apparent in Mina Harker.

I loved how the character of Mina becomes a prototype of what people would eventually call “The Final Girl”, not because of her physical strength or survival instincts, but because of her unwavering faith in God. I knew this was essentially a story of good and evil, but I was wonderfully surprised by this being a story of faith vs flesh and corruption vs holiness.

This book has engendered controversy for almost forcefully bridging the gap between the 15th Century Wallachian Prince Vlad III or Vlad the Impaler or Dracula. Stoker had already constructed his character, called “Count Wampyr,” before he learned of his future namesake. However, he quite clearly establishes a connection between the two through an explanation provided by Abraham Van Helsing. The Dracula of the eponymous novel is a heavily fictionalized version of the real-life figure, but so are most similarly positioned characters in literature, film, and television. Florescu and McNally provide a cursory overview of Slavic and Balkan vampire folklore, a biographical sketch of Vlad the Impaler, and illuminate the process by which Stoker adapted this violent, cunning, and sometimes brilliant nationalist and military tactician into a fictional monster.