Dracula Book by Bram Stoker (PDF-Summary-Review-Online Reading-Download)

Dracula is a gothic horror novel from 1897 by Irish author Bram Stoker. He introduced the character of Count Dracula and established many later vampire fantasy conventions. The novel tells the story of Dracula’s attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he can find new blood and spread the curse of the Walking Dead, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of people led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres, including vampire literature, horror fiction, Gothic fiction, and invasion literature. The novel has generated numerous theatrical, cinematographic, and television interpretations.

Book Summary

The story is told in an epistolary format, such as a series of letters, journal entries, newspaper articles, and ship registration entries, whose narrators are the protagonists of the novel, and sometimes complemented by newspaper clippings related to events not witnessed directly. The events portrayed in the novel take place chronologically and mainly in England and Transylvania in the same year between May 3 and November 6. A brief note at the end of the final chapter is written 7 years after the events described in the novel.

The story begins with Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English lawyer, who visits Count Dracula in his castle in the Carpathian Mountains on the border of Transylvania, Bucovina, and Moldova, to provide legal support for a real estate transaction supervised by the Harker’s employer, Mr. Peter Hawkins of Exeter. Initially impressed by Dracula’s gentle manners, Harker soon realizes that he is Dracula’s prisoner. Wandering around the Count’s castle against Dracula’s warning, Harker meets three vampire sisters, from whom Dracula rescues him. Harker soon realizes that Dracula himself is also a vampire. After the preparations, Dracula leaves Transylvania and leaves Harker to the sisters. Harker barely escapes the castle with his life.

Dracula tackles a Russian ship, the Demeter, carrying boxes of land from Transylvania, which he needs to regain his strength. The anchored boat in Varna and finally run aground on the coast of Whitby, in the northeast of England. The captain’s record chronicles the gradual disappearance of the entire crew, until the captain only remained, tied to the helm to stay on course. An animal similar to “a big dog” is seen jumping ashore. It was later learned that Dracula successfully purchased several properties under the alias ‘Count of Ville’ throughout London and designed to distribute the boxes to each of them using transport services and moving them himself. It does so to secure their lairs and the earth boxes would be used as graves, which would guarantee safety and rest during the moments of feeding and replenishing their strength.

Harker’s fiance, Mina Murray, stays with her friend Lucy Westenra, who is on vacation in Whitby. Lucy receives three marriage proposals from Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood (the son of Lord Godalming, who later succeeds in the title). Lucy accepts Holmwood’s proposal while rejecting Seward and Morris, but everyone is still friends. Dracula communicates with Seward’s patient, Renfield, a crazy man who wants to consume insects, spiders, birds, and rats to absorb his life force. Renfield can detect the presence of Dracula and provides clues accordingly.

Soon it is indirectly shown that Dracula is stalking Lucy. As time passes, he begins to suffer episodes of sleepwalking and dementia, as Mina testifies. When Lucy begins to consume herself suspiciously, Seward invites her old teacher, Abraham Van Helsing, who immediately determines the true cause of Lucy’s condition. He refuses to reveal it but diagnoses it with acute blood loss. Van Helsing prescribes numerous blood transfusions to which he, Seward, Quincey, and Arthur contribute over time. Van Helsing also prescribes garlic flowers to place throughout her room and weaves a necklace of withered Garlic flowers for her to use. However, she continues to consume herself, seeming to lose blood every night.

Van Helsing tries to protect Lucy with garlic, but fate frustrates him every night, whether Lucy’s mother removes garlic from her room or Lucy herself does it in her restless sleep. While both doctors are absent, Lucy and her mother are attacked by a wolf and Mrs. Westenra, who has a heart condition, dies of fear. Doctors find two small puncture marks on Lucy’s neck, which Dr. Seward cannot understand. After Lucy also dies, Van Helsing places a gold crucifix over her mouth, apparently to delay or prevent Lucy’s vampire conversion. Fate conspires against him again when Van Helsing finds the crucifix in possession of one of the servants who stole it from Lucy’s body.

After Lucy’s death and burial, newspapers report that the children were harassed at night by a “lady bloofer” (ie, “beautiful lady”) [3]. Van Helsing, knowing that Lucy has become a vampire, trusts Arthur, Seward, and Morris. The suitors and Van Helsing track her and, after a confrontation with her, they stack her heart, decapitate her and fill her mouth with garlic. Almost at the same time, Jonathan Harker arrives from Budapest, where Mina marries him after his escape, and he and Mina join the campaign against Dracula.

Vampire hunters stay at Dr. Seward’s residence, holding nightly meetings and providing reports based on each of their various tasks. Mina discovers that each of her diaries and letters collectively contains clues through which they can track Dracula. She is responsible for collecting them, investigating newspaper clippings, adjusting the most relevant entries in chronological order and writing copies to distribute to each of the parties they are going to study. Jonathan Harker tracks shipments of tombs inboxes and the properties that Dracula has purchased for storage.

Van Helsing conducts an investigation together with Dr. Seward to analyze the behavior of his Renfield patient, who learns that he is directly influenced by Dracula. They also investigate historical events, folklore and superstitions of diverse cultures to understand Dracula’s powers and weaknesses. Van Helsing also establishes a criminal profile in Dracula to better understand his actions and predict his movements. Arthur Holmwood’s fortune helps finance the entire operation.

As they discover the various properties that Dracula had bought, the male protagonists team up to attack each property and face Dracula several times. By placing each of the tombs in boxes scattered throughout London, they open them to place and seal wafers of sacramental bread inside. This act makes the earth’s boxes completely useless for Dracula since he cannot open, enter or transport them.

After Dracula finds out about the group’s plot against him, he attacks Mina three times and gives him his own blood to control her. This curses Mina with vampirism and changes her, but does not completely make her a vampire. Van Helsing tries to bless Mina through prayer and placing a sacrament wafer against her forehead but burns it on contact leaving a miserable scar. Under this curse, Mina ranges from consciousness to a semi-trance during which she perceives the surroundings and the actions of Dracula. Van Helsing can use hypnotism twice a day, at sunrise and sunset, to put her in this trance to follow Dracula’s movements. Mina, fearful of Dracula’s bond with her, urges the team not to tell her their plans for fear that Dracula will listen to her. After the protagonists discover and sterilize 49 boxes found in their dens in London, they learn that Dracula fled with the box number 50 that is missing to his castle in Transylvania. They chase him under Mina’s guidance.

They split into teams once they arrived in Europe; Van Helsing and Mina go to Dracula’s castle, while the others try to ambush the boat that Dracula uses to get home. Van Helsing assaults the castle and destroys the vampire sisters. Upon discovering that Dracula is transported by gypsies, the three teams converge and attack the caravan that takes Dracula in the 50th box on Earth. After sending many gypsies who had sworn to protect the count, Harker cuts Dracula by the throat with a kukri knife, while Quincey, mortally wounded, stabs the earl in the heart with a Bowie knife. Dracula crumbles and Mina breaks free of her vampirism curse, while the scar on her forehead disappears. Shortly after, Quincey dies of his wounds.

The book closes with a note left by Jonathan Harker seven years after the events of the novel, detailing his married life with Mina and the birth of his son, whom they name after the four members of the party, but who They run like Quincey. Young Quincey is depicted sitting on Van Helsing’s knee while telling his adventure. Seward and Arthur have married.

Deleted ending
A small section of a draft of the final chapter was removed, in which Dracula’s castle crumbles as he dies, hiding the fact that the vampires were always there.

As we watched, there was a terrible upheaval of the earth, so that we seemed to swing and fall to our knees. At the same time, with a roar that seemed to shake the skies, the entire castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood seemed to rise in the air and disperse in fragments, while a powerful cloud of black and volumetric yellow smoke in volume in rolling greatness he was shot upward with inconceivable speed.

Then there was a stillness in nature when the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come with the hollow burst of thunder: the long and reverberating scroll that seems as if the floors of the sky trembled. Then, in a powerful ruin that fell from where they rose, came the fragments that had been thrown into the sky in the cataclysm.

From our point of view, it seemed that the explosion of a fierce volcano had satisfied the need for nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into a vacuum. We were so horrified by the abruptness and greatness that we forgot to think about ourselves.

Book Club Questions

Book Review

Dracula: the same name instantly remembers visions of vampires, stakes, garlic, and crucifixes. But when one reads the novel, one realizes how twisted modern vampire fiction has become.

Vampires are not meant to exist as heroes. Go back a few hundred years and men truly believed that the vampire was a true immortal, cursed to quench his eternal thirst with the blood of a living mortal. The very idea of ​​a blood drinker inspires the very image of a villain in the mind. And that is the title character of this novel.

The word novel is not used lightly, but it could also be written that it is a collaboration of magazines, letters, and documents. Because that’s how Bram Stoker chose to create his famous novel (in epistolary form). And the different points of view through each magazine serve to create suspense that adapts perfectly to the gothic tone of the novel.

In general, it is a macabre novel that serves the reader to reflect on good and evil. The vampire for me is nothing more than an indication of the cursed nature of man and that, unless delivered, must suck the lives of those around him. Finally, only the righteous can destroy the darkness that serves to drain life.

About The Author

Abraham (Bram) Stoker was an Irish writer, best known for his Gothic classic Dracula, which continues to influence horror writers and fans more than 100 years after it was first published. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, in science, mathematics, oratory, history, and composition, Stoker’s writing was greatly influenced by his father’s interest in theatre and his mother’s gruesome stories about her childhood during the cholera epidemic in 1832. Although a published author of the novels Dracula, The Lady of the Shroud, and The Lair of the White Worm, and his work as part of the literary staff of The London Daily Telegraph, Stoker made his living as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker died in 1912, leaving behind one of the most memorable horror characters ever created.

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