When young solicitor’s clerk Jonathan Harker goes to the remote castle of Count Dracula to oversee a property transaction, he is ready to encounter some quaint beliefs and customs. After all, the Count’s home is in the great Carpathian mountains in the heart of Transylvania, where ‘every known superstition in the world is gathered’. But nothing can prepare Harker for the horror of his sojourn with the Count, and he barely escapes with his life.
Later that summer, a Russian schooner arrives at Whitby harbour, steered by the hand of a dead man and bearing a mysterious cargo – boxes of earth from Transylvania. Count Dracula has realised his ambition of entering England, and he brings horror in his wake. Led by the learned Professor van Helsing, Harker and his allies must do everything they can to defeat this unspeakable enemy.
Dracula presents a sweeping panorama of 19th-century Europe, from the wilds of Transylvania to the Yorkshire coast, via the streets of London. With his tale of a blood-sucking entity entering England by subterfuge and possessing English women, Stoker reaches into the darkest corners of the Victorian mind, revealing deep unspoken fears of sexuality and foreign invasion. Mingling 19th-century anxieties with the oldest terrors of European myth, Dracula is one of the greatest of all gothic novels, and still has the power to chill the blood.
Our new edition includes a specially commissioned introduction by John Banville, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize and a master of the contemporary gothic novel.
Illustrated by Abigail Rorer. Introduced by John Banville.
Bound in buckram.
Set in Bulmer.
Colour frontispiece and 8 black & white plates.
Book size: 9½" x 6¼", 392 pages.