The best Dracula books

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.

I must admit this book appealed to me first because it was co-written by the great-grand-nephew of Bram Stoker. I also loved that a young Bram Stoker was a main character. I won’t offer any spoilers but it’s a fascinating tale about how Stoker was inspired to write his book, Dracula. If you’re looking for a horror tale, this book supplies plenty of terror and like most books that feature Dracula as a character, you will find yourself in locations all over Europe. This book offers yet another fine example of the enduring spell Count Dracula casts on our imaginations.

Fred Saberhagen is another author that wrote a lot of really great books but no one really talks about him. I was obsessed with Sherlock Holmes as a kid and was disappointed when I realized that I’d read all of the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. I found a beat up copy of The Holmes-Dracula File in a used bookstore and I was hooked. The book is as advertised, Sherlock Holmes and Count Dracula team up to solve a mystery. Just like Harry Harrison, Saberhagen also wrote a lot of books that cover the waterfront of speculative fiction. (If you want a good fantasy series The Book of Swords series is great.)  

Not the first vampire tale by any means, but the most iconic.

Stoker researched the subject for seven years and filled his novel with vampire lore combined with contemporary science and technology – all presented as an absorbing scrapbook of diaries, journals, letters, telegrams, and newspaper cuttings.

In doing so, he crystallized the figure of the aristocratic vampire, which rapidly became a hit on the silver screen through a succession of influential adaptations that played alongside a limitless appetite for new vampire fiction.

By the 1960s the vampire was a cornerstone of the horror cinema and comic books; come the 1970s and rock music embraced vampire chic through the undying Goth subculture while Hallowe’en, cosplay, and gaming became synonymous with capes and fangs.

The figure of the vampire may have been reworked many times, but Dracula remains the fountainhead.

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.

Newman’s creative mashup brings a dizzying host of personalities into the Jack the Ripper murders as historical people and characters from fiction collide in Queen Victoria’s London. Vlad Tepes casts a long shadow across the political and social landscape. This take on Dracula himself, and other ancient vampires, is fresh and frightening and I was glad to discover it. The playful mix has Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Inspector Lestrade investigating The Ripper in a world where vampires are out in public, and Vlad is Prince Consort to Queen Victoria. The bold concept works well and is a ferociously fun ride.

I have a weakness for authors who can seamlessly write in another author’s style, and The Adventure of the Sanguinary Count blends Conan Doyle and Stoker perfectly. Holmes and Watson are drawn into the tale of Count Dracula when they are called to investigate the mystery of a ship whose crew have vanished, adding their genius to the vampire hunters working to keep the Count from the shores of England. With Dracula Daily taking the online world by storm, this is the perfect time to look up another take on these classic tales. 

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.

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.

After Bram Stoker and Vlad the Impaler, the real person most closely associated with vampires has to be Bela Lugosi—so why not write a horror novel with him as the villain? This book underscores the important role that unsettling and dramatic occurrences can play in shaking us out of our own accustomed vices, as well as the difficulty we often face when trying to discern the difference between the works of evil and the truly mundane. After all, Bela Lugosi is nothing more than a tired, sad old man still pining for his glory days on the silver screen—isn’t he?

A must-have for everyone who wants to learn about Dracula. In short chapters and with humorous language, Miller wipes the floor with all authors who never cared to do their homework and have been spreading misunderstandings about Stoker’s epochal novel. Taken altogether, it outlines what I would call the “Millerian paradigm,” claiming that as an author of fiction, Stoker was not bound to historical or geographical accuracy, and may have messed up a detail or two. By now, I have demonstrated that Stoker was more precise than Miller believed, and have worded a new paradigm focusing on the “Paradox of Fact and Fiction” Stoker was caught in. But we all stand on the shoulders of giants, and Elizabeth Miller was the most important of them.

Frayling’s book is very much a forerunner of Groom’s, being one of the first serious (but also immensely readable) studies of the vampire in culture. This one keeps its sights trained more on the nineteenth-century vampire. It begins with The Vampyre, the story written by John Polidori at the Villa Diodati at the same infamous gathering that spawned Marty Shelley’s Frankenstein. Polidori was Lord Byron’s physician, but the two men fell out badly, and Polidori’s aristocratic bloodsucker Lord Ruthven is widely regarded as modeled on Byron. Although now little remembered, The Vampyre began the Victorian craze for vampires that culminated in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Frayling is the perfect guide, being not only a cultural historian of wide learning but also a splendid communicator.

This Icelandic Dracula remained hidden from the world-at-large as merely a translation of the original for more than a century before Hans Corneel de Roos translated the Icelandic back into English. What he discovered is that Asmundsson took the liberty of making Dracula his own book. A Nordic spin on the vampire is reason enough to discover this interesting take on Stoker’s Dracula. Two-thirds of the book takes place at the Count’s castle in Transylvania where the notorious vampire is given much more depth and voice. Nordic lore spices this story up as well as a very seductive vampiress. The book is also much shorter than Stoker’s, which makes it an easy read.