Dracula

Dracula, a novel by B. Stoker, published 1897, the most famous of all tales of vampirism.

The story is told through the diaries of a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker, his fiancée Mina, her friend Lucy Westenra, and Dr John Seward, the superintendent of a large lunatic asylum at Purfleet, in Essex. It begins with Harker's journey to Count Dracula's eerie castle in Transylvania. After various horrifying experiences as an inmate of the castle, Jonathan goes to a ruined chapel, where he finds 50 great wooden boxes filled with earth recently dug from the graveyard of the Draculas, in one of which the Un-Dead Count is lying, gorged with blood. The boxes are shipped to Whitby and thence to Carfax. Dracula disembarks at Whitby in the shape of a wolf, having dispatched the entire ship's crew en route, and proceeds to vampirize Lucy who despite multiple blood transfusions and the occult precautions of Dr Seward's old teacher Professor Van Helsing dies drained of blood but remains Un-Dead until staked through the heart. The rest of the book tells of the attempt to save Mina from Dracula's insidious advances and of the search for the boxes of earth, his only refuge between sunrise and sunset. All but one of these are neutralized with fragments of the Host. The last, with Dracula in it, is followed by Van Helsing and the others back to Transylvania where, after a thrilling chase, the Count is beheaded and stabbed through the heart, at which his body crumbles to dust.

Dracula—tall and thin, with his beaky nose, pointed ears, cruel and sensual features, and ‘peculiarly shaped white teeth’ protruding over his lips—has been the subject of many films.

Dracula the Transylvanian vampire in Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897). The name is a variant of Drakula, Dragwlya, names given to Vlad Ţepeş (Vlad the Impaler), a 15th-century prince of Wallachia renowned for his cruelty.