Bram Stoker's Dracula

Dracula (1897) is a novel by Irish author Bram Stoker , and the name of the world's most famous vampire character.

Bram Stoker's Dracula - 1902 Doubleday

The novel is narrated by multiple voices - Jonathan's journal of his trip to Transylvania, Mina's diary, and Seward's recorded journal, as well as letters and newspaper items. Although somewhat crude and certainly sensational, the novel also does have psychological power, and the sexual longings underlying the vampire attacks are manifest.

Despite its important contributions to vampire fiction, several popular traits of fictional vampires are absent. Count Dracula is killed by a bowie knife, not a wooden stake. The destruction of the vampire Lucy is a three-part process (staking, decapitation, and garlic in the mouth), not the simple stake-only procedure often found in later vampire stories. Dracula has the ability to travel as a mist and to scale the external walls of his castle. One very famous trait Stoker added is the inability to be seen in mirrors, which is not something found in traditional Eastern European folklore.

It is also notable in the novel that Dracula can walk about in the daylight, in bright sunshine, though apparently without the ability to use most of his powers, like turning into mist or a bat. He is still strong and fast enough to struggle with and escape from most of his male pursuers, in a scene in the book. Traditional vampire folklore does not usually hold that sunlight is fatal to vampires though they are nocturnal. It is only with the film Nosferatu that the daylight is first depicted as deadly to vampires.

You can find more about the original novel by reading it:

(This work is in the public domain in the U.S. and other countries where copyright has expired on works published before 1923.)