The best Dracula books 📚

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… show more.

An unquestionable classic! Stoker’s narrative technique of telling the legendary vampire’s story through the diary and journal entries of its characters creates a realism rarely felt in horror fiction. The reader feels as though they are an investigator learning details of a supernatural phenomenon that can’t be reasonably explained in any other way. It makes for literature gripping enough to spawn decades of imitators. 

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… show more.

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?