by Bram Stoker.
First published in 1897, and is the most famous of all tales of Vampirisms. 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, in connection with the Count's purchase of Carfax, an ancient estate adjoining Dr Seward's asylum. After various horrifying experiences as an inmate of the castle, Jonathan makes his way to a ruined chapel, where he finds 50 great wooden boxes filled with earth recently dug from the graveyard of the Dracula, in one of which the Un-Dead Count is lying, gorged with blood. These boxes are shipped from Varna 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.
