Dracula
Bram Stoker's 1897 novel is told entirely through journals, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, which slowly assemble a single terrifying picture. The young solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to help Count Dracula buy property in England — and discovers his host is no ordinary nobleman. When Dracula reaches England, a small band led by the vampire-hunter Abraham Van Helsing must understand what they are facing before it spreads.
A cornerstone of Gothic horror, Dracula fixed the modern image of the vampire and pits Victorian science and reason against an ancient, predatory evil. Beneath the chase runs an undercurrent of fear and desire, faith and superstition, and anxiety about everything modern England thought it had left behind.
How it begins
How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them. DRACULA CHAPTER I JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL (Kept in shorthand.) 3 May. Bistritz.--Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule. We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.