A portrait of Dracula

Today's countdown to Halloween post is a followup to that one. So you know that I developed early on a fascination and literary passion about Dracula by Bram Stoker. It had predated reading the novel, but once I had read it, it became pure obsession. It was not enough to have read it, in fact, I had to re-read it and own the book. So I received the novel as a present on my 16th birthday. It was this edition, with this very cover. I was very happy to see the cover, for one reason. One of the many shocks I had reading Dracula for the first time was discovering that the Count did not look like Bela Lugosi or even Christopher Lee. He was not an aristocrat with a clean shaved face and dark hair, but an elderly feral looking nobleman with a thick white moustache. His appearance changed throughout the novel as he drank blood and grew younger, but this is how he appears early on, as a nasty old man, all clad in black. Suffice to say, that I find this description far more terrifying than any of its very liberal adaptations. So the portrait on this book cover is not perfect, but it's very close to how I imagined Dracula from the first time I read the novel onward. I hope this is the image you will have of the most famous (and infamous) vampire too.