Review: DRACULA by Bram Stoker

This wasn't the first vampire novel, but it's defined the genre like nothing else. Its closest competitor is Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, and that's a very distant second. For all practical purposes, Count Dracula is the vampire in the English-speaking world, and vice versa.

That said, it's still a very unusual book. It's epistolary, meaning it's written in the form of letters. Since the letters and diary entries are by several different characters, this not only allows Stoker to be an omniscient narrator without seeming like one, but also lends the book a sense of immediacy that raises it from a pretty good story to a classic. It also requires Stoker to juggle several different writing styles, but he's up to the challenge.

It takes some doing to make a book a century old scary, especially when the end is already well-known. That's what this book is, and that's why I recommend it.