On May 26, 1897, a strange new novel appeared in bookshops in London. The cover was plain yellow with red letters. The title was a single word: Dracula. Its author, an Irish theater manager named Bram Stoker, had spent seven years researching and writing it. He'd dug through old folktales about vampires from Eastern Europe, read about a real medieval prince named Vlad III, and visited the seaside town of Whitby for inspiration. The book wasn't an instant bestseller, but it would slowly creep into the imaginations of readers everywhere.
The story is told through letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings - a clever trick that makes it feel like real evidence of something impossible. A young English lawyer named Jonathan Harker visits a count in a crumbling castle in Transylvania. Things get weirder and weirder. The count, it turns out, is a centuries-old creature who can turn into a bat, sails to England in a coffin, and starts hunting Jonathan's friends. A vampire-hunting professor named Abraham Van Helsing leads the chase to stop him.
Stoker probably had no idea what he had created. Over the next century, Dracula became one of the most famous characters in all of fiction. He starred in silent films like Nosferatu, in old black-and-white movies with Bela Lugosi swirling his cape, in the Twilight series, in the Hotel Transylvania cartoons, and in countless Halloween costumes. The novel itself has never gone out of print. Bram Stoker died in 1912 without becoming rich from Dracula, but his shadowy count has lived on long after him - exactly the sort of immortality the vampire himself would have appreciated.
