Gather close, sexy and nocturnal reader.  Today we celebrate the publication of a tome that has, since it’s unholy genesis on May 19, 1897, served as nothing less than the sanguinary keystone of gothic literature: Bram Stoker’s Dracula. More than a novel, Dracula is a veritable cathedral of dread, its spires of epistolary prose piercing the fog of Victorian propriety to reveal the pulsating, crimson heart of fear itself—a fear that is, at its core, an exquisite commingling of the erotic and the eschatological, the known and the unfathomable (damn, that was sexy, if I may say so myself).

For those of you who didn’t spend your university years dissecting the entrails of literary theory—perhaps you were sensibly studying something practical, like engineering, or simply avoiding sunlight for reasons I shan’t pry into—let me illuminate the epistolary form, which Dracula wields like a silver dagger. An epistolary novel is one told through letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, and the like, a narrative stitched together from fragments of personal accounts, as if you’re piecing together a shattered stained-glass window in a crumbling cathedral. In Dracula, this means we experience the creeping horror through Jonathan Harker’s meticulous journals, Mina Murray’s desperate letters, and Dr. Seward’s clinical notes, each voice a flickering candle in the dark, revealing the Count’s shadow through their fractured perspectives. It’s intimate, voyeuristic, and maddeningly fragmented—like eavesdropping on the last confessions of the damned.

Stoker’s masterwork, you see, is less a narrative than a palimpsest (look it up) of primal anxieties, its pages dripping with the ichor (look this one up, too…I borrowed it from Poe’s The Conqueror Worm from last night’s reading) of the unknown—those tenebrous forces that slink beyond the candlelit periphery of human understanding. Through the diaristic machinations of Harker, Seward, and the ill-fated Lucy Westenra , Stoker conjures a Count who is not merely a monster, but a metaphysical rupture—a walking, stalking lacuna in the fabric of modernity, his castle a labyrinthine memento mori where time itself curdles like blood in a chalice. The novel’s exploration of sexuality—veiled, yet throbbing beneath the surface like a carotid artery—anticipates Freud by a hairsbreadth, its subtext a gothic danse macabre of repression and release, wherein Mina’s purity is both shield and sacrificial altar, and Dracula’s bite a perverse Eucharist, transubstantiating innocence into damnation (c’mon, dear reader…who else gives you “transubstantiating innocence into damnation” on a Sunday?).

And the influence! My god, the influence of this sepulchral text sprawls like a plague-ridden shadow across the cultural firmament—its tendrils ensnaring film, theater, and the collective unconscious with a rapacity that would make the Count himself proud. From Murnau’s Nosferatu to Coppola’s baroque fever-dream, from stage adaptations that revel in crimson melodrama to the modern horror renaissance that owes its very lifeblood to Stoker’s creation, Dracula remains a cultural juggernaut, its themes of alienation, contagion, and the seductive pull of the abyss as resonant in 2025 as they were in 1897.

Initially a modest success, Dracula has since metastasized into the very DNA of vampire mythology, its legacy a testament to the enduring power of literary horror to excavate the darkest recesses of the human (and perhaps inhuman) psyche. Read it, I implore you, beneath the flicker of a dying candle, and feel the chill of eternity seep into your bones. In its pages, you’ll find a reflection of the void—and the terrible, beautiful hunger that dwells within it.

N.P.: “The Last Path Home” – CHANT