Dracula

Dracula is a Gothic horror novel by the Irish writer Bram Stoker, published in 1897 and told through an assemblage of letters, diary entries and newspaper clippings. It follows the English solicitor Jonathan Harker's imprisonment at the Transylvanian castle of Count Dracula, an ancient vampire who then travels to England and preys on Harker's fiancee Mina and her friend Lucy Westenra, prompting the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing to lead a group including Harker, Dr. John Seward and the American Quincey Morris in pursuit of the Count back to Transylvania. Drawing on earlier vampire fiction, Eastern European folklore and, loosely, the historical reputation of the Wallachian ruler Vlad III, Stoker fused these sources with Victorian anxieties about foreignness, sexuality and modern science into what became the defining vampire narrative in English. Adapted into film and stage more often than almost any other novel, Dracula established many of the conventions, garlic, wooden stakes, crucifixes and shape-shifting, that later fiction and film still associate with vampires, and remains the founding text of vampire fiction as a genre.