Before You Begin

Before you begin.

It begins with a young English solicitor's travel diary, kept in shorthand: a coach winding up into the Carpathians, garlic pressed into his hand by frightened peasants, and a courteous host whose eyebrows almost meet over the nose and whose sharp white teeth protrude over remarkably red lips. By the time Jonathan Harker understands what is sharing the castle with him, the thing he fears has already booked passage to England.

Bram Stoker, an Irish theatre manager who spent years quietly gathering folklore, ship's logs, and the geography of Transylvania and Whitby, assembled his novel entirely from letters, journals, telegrams, and phonograph recordings. That documentary trick is the book's genius: there is no calm narrator to reassure you, only ordinary people writing down impossible things as they happen.

What has kept Dracula alive for well over a century is not the monster alone but the company ranged against him: Mina Harker, methodical and brave; Lucy Westenra, who receives three proposals in a single day; the genial Texan Quincey Morris; the asylum-keeper Dr. Seward; the grieving Lord Godalming; and the eccentric Dutch professor Van Helsing, who alone guesses what they are truly fighting. Around them circles Renfield, the asylum's most disturbing patient, who senses the master long before the others do.

This illustrated edition gathers the novel's twenty-seven chapters into six visual movements — recap plates you unlock as you read, each drawing together the faces, places, and turns of the story so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page and step into the gallery: the characters, the maps, and the haunted places of a story that taught the modern world to fear the dark.