Once Dracula Daily's Done, I Think One Of The Books We Should Put In Email Format Next Is The Screwtape

Once Dracula Daily's done, I think one of the books we should put in email format next is The Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis. It would be so funny for us to recieve an email every other day from our tired demon uncle Screwtape chastising us for being incompetent at our job.

Dracula’s Lineage Speech

If anyone for any reason would appreciate a blow by blow breakdown of everything that is going on in the Count’s lineage speech, matching all of Dracula’s dialogue to Stoker’s research sources and describing the historical events being alluded to, I made one of those many many years ago and I’ve copy/pasted it under the cut:

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I feel like everyone new to reading Dracula this year would probably benefit from knowing that in the original outline, Jonathan at the beginning of the novel was already supposed to have undergone the events in “Dracula’s Guest” where he spent Walpurgisnacht wandering around in a storm and watching a hot vampire lady get struck by lightning before a wolf-that-was-probably-Dracula came and sat on him to keep him warm all night.

I feel like this missing bit of information goes a long way to explaining why he’s sort of like: “Storm. Wolves. Mysterious blue flames my preternaturally strong driver gets out to inspect. Is this a normal part of being a solicitor? (Mem. Remember not to call yourself a clerk. Mina will be proud of you. <3)”

It’s worth noting that while Stoker definitely drew upon sources purporting to describe vampire folklore in establishing rules for his own vampires, some of the vampire “lore” you see in play in Dracula is original to him. The mirror thing doesn’t seem to have been around before Stoker. While there are regional superstitions one can track down about needing to cover mirrors in the home of the recently dead to prevent their corpse from turning vampiric, the idea that vampires cast no reflection appears to really have had its start with this novel. What’s more, it was only part of what was planned in Stoker’s notes on vampiric irreproducibility. While it never made it into the final text, Stoker wrote down vampires also wouldn’t show up in photographs (which is might be related to Jonathan conveniently mentioning his kodak camera) and that even attempting to paint a vampire would fail. Apparently painting a vampire was just supposed to end up looking like somebody else. Photographs would either come out black or show a skeleton or corpse.

our boy jonathan, rotting away in castle dracula and having to pretend he's chill with it:

you cannot understand how excitedly i have been waiting for this day. now everyone will understand why i like jonathan so much. free climbing a sheer stone wall. has he ever even gone rock climbing before? we don't know! he just Did It.