When I first read Dracula

I thought it was necessary for my countdown to Halloween to blog early on about the spooky aspect of the holidays. It is not Halloween without scary stories to read and without some classic characters. So today, I will blog about Dracula, my favourite horror novel. I knew from an early age about the character, but only the cliché depictions from the movies and the many, many images one finds of him, especially around this time of year: the tall, lean man with a black and red cape. I was fascinated by him and vampires. My parents would not allow me to watch any Dracula movie as a child, even parodies neither would they let us find any literature regarding the Count. I first came to know him indirectly, through this gamebook, which inspired one of my favourite childhood games. I developed an obsession about him and I searched and searched for the original novel by Bram Stoker, to finally find it, at age 13, in the local library. It was during our summer holidays. I read it first, then my brothers did.

You can see on this post the picture of the front cover of the exact edition that I had found at the library. It was from the Bibliothèque verte, a publisher for teenagers and apparently, or so my mother said, specialized at a time in proper, tasteful literature for young women (such as herself when she was a young woman). It had a long intro and many notes to analyze the text chapter by chapter that were quite interesting, albeit they gave a lot of the plot away and were sometimes rigged with inaccuracies. Concerning the inspiration for Dracula for instance: no, Vlad Tepes was not the inspiration for the count, Stoker knew nothing of him, not even his real name. He only knew the nickname,which he found in a footnote, thought it sounded cool and ran with it. Also, Stoker had no knowledge of Bran Castle, which thus was not used as model for Castle Dracula. I learned all this later of course and the Bibliothèque verte was just transmitting common misconceptions at the time. For me, the notes, introduction and the novel itself had some kind of Biblical authenticity. It was gospel. And so I read Dracula, I was completely engrossed in it, I only stopped to sleep (when I could find sleep, this was a very scary read) and eat and I think I had finished within a week. To this day, this was the best reading experience I've ever had and I come back to the novel from time to time with the same enthusiasm. This was one of my first literary loves.