The Bookstore / Books
Title:
Dracula
Author: Bram Stoker
First Published in: 1897
The story is told through the diaries of a young
solicitor, Jonathan Harker, his fiancee 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 Undead 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—rail and chin, 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.
Text file provided by:
Project Gutenberg
[?kB Zip file]