Dracula

Far away in England, life goes on in letters and diaries. Lucy Westenra writes to her friend Mina about three proposals in a single day and the man she has chosen. Dr. Seward, refused, buries himself in the study of a patient obsessed with the idea that the blood is the life. A violent storm drives a derelict schooner aground at Whitby with a dead man lashed to the wheel and a great dog that leaps ashore and vanishes. And Lucy, sleeping well and eating well, grows paler by the day, two small wounds at her throat refusing to heal.

Told through journals, letters, a ship's log, and even a phonograph's recorded grief, the novel gathers its many voices into one converging dread. Into it steps Van Helsing, a Dutch professor, physician, believer, who reads the marks on Lucy's throat and understands what science alone cannot explain. "Not so; alas! not so. It is only the beginning!"

Stoker builds his horror slowly, ritualistically, letting clinical detail and old superstition press against each other until both feel true. Here is a small band of ordinary, devoted people—a clerk and his resourceful wife, a grieving fiancé, a doctor, a professor—setting themselves against something ancient and patient. The door stands open. Enter freely.