Hi! My name’s Qwerty and I’ll be your Dracula tour guide today 😊
Please find below a summary of each day's events as well as clarifications and explanations for any words, phrases, or customs that may not be super familiar to folks who don’t read 19th Century literature regularly.
My plan is to do this for every update, so I’ll be releasing them concurrently with any correspondences we have from our mutual friend Jonathan -- and anyone else we meet along the way!
Content Warning: This excerpt contains imprisonment and coercive control, psychological horror, graphic blood imagery, attempted violence, suicidal ideation (situational/despair-driven), religious distress, dehumanisation, and intense hopelessness, as well as racist language typical of the period.
Summary
Jonathan wakes up just before the dawn, believing these may be the final words he ever writes. Convinced that death is near, he kneels in prayer so that, if he dies, he will meet death spiritually prepared. As daylight arrives, he feels the familiar sense of safety that morning has come to represent and rushes to the castle's front door, believing escape is finally within reach. His hope is immediately crushed: although the chains and bolts can be removed, the door has once again been locked after Dracula returned, making escape impossible.
Driven by desperation, Jonathan resolves to climb once more into Dracula's chambers and search for the missing key, deciding that even death at Dracula's hands would be preferable to remaining imprisoned. Descending again into the ruined chapel, he discovers Dracula lying within one of the great wooden boxes. This time, however, the Count has changed dramatically. Rather than the deathly figure Jonathan saw days earlier, Dracula appears rejuvenated: his hair has darkened, his cheeks are full, his skin flushed beneath its pallor, and fresh blood stains his lips and chin. Jonathan realises with horror that Dracula has recently fed and that each victim restores his youth and strength.
Unable to find the key, Jonathan is overwhelmed by the knowledge that he himself has helped bring such a creature to England. Fearing the countless future victims Dracula may claim in London, he attempts to destroy him with a shovel. The blow glances harmlessly away after Dracula's terrifying gaze seems to paralyse him, leaving only a wound across the forehead before the coffin lid falls shut once more. Jonathan is left wondering whether the paralysis was supernatural or simply the result of terror.
As he tries to decide what to do next, Jonathan hears the arrival of the Romani and Slovaks. Hoping to escape through whatever entrance they use, he races back toward Dracula's room, but before he can investigate, a sudden gust slams the door to the winding stair shut behind him, trapping him once again. Listening helplessly, he hears the workers carrying away the great boxes of earth, hammering the lids closed, and finally locking the castle behind them as they depart with Dracula hidden inside.
Left entirely alone in the castle with the three vampire women, Jonathan concludes that remaining there is a fate worse than death. Declaring that Mina bears no resemblance to the monstrous women below, he resolves to make one final escape attempt by climbing farther down the castle walls than ever before. Taking some of Dracula's gold in case he survives, Jonathan prepares either to reach civilisation or, failing that, to throw himself from the precipice, believing that even such a death would preserve his humanity better than whatever fate Dracula intends for him. His diary closes with a farewell to Mina and the hope that God's mercy is greater than the monsters surrounding him.
Clarifications, Explanations, and Footnotes
Prayer Before Action - Jonathan's instinct is first to pray and only then to act. His faith has evolved considerably since the beginning of the novel: the sceptical English solicitor who politely accepted a peasant woman's crucifix now entrusts both his life and death to God's judgement.
The Cock-Crow - Drawing on both folklore and the New Testament, the cock crow at dawn is a recurring symbol of hope, divine order, and temporary safety.
Leech - A leech is a blood-feeding parasite long associated with medicine and disease. Although there was briefly a "leech mania" in early Victorian medicine, it had largely declined by the time Dracula was written and published. Jonathan's description of Dracula as "a filthy leech" emphasises both his grotesque dependence upon blood and that he is a parasite upon humanity.
Basilisk - In medieval legend, the basilisk was a monstrous serpent or reptile whose gaze could kill or paralyse those who looked directly at it.
The Boxes of Earth - The fifty boxes of Transylvanian soil are finally loaded for transport. Jonathan now understands that they are central to Dracula's move to England and constitute a vital part of his plans.
The Ethics of Killing Dracula - Jonathan's attempted attack is framed not as vengeance but as an act of moral responsibility. He believes that allowing Dracula to reach London would condemn countless future victims, making the destruction of the Count an obligation rather than an act of personal revenge.
The Failure of Rational Heroism - Jonathan possesses courage, intelligence, and determination, yet these qualities repeatedly prove insufficient against supernatural evil. The novel continually frustrates the Victorian belief that rationality and individual action alone can overcome every obstacle.
Dracula as Colonial Invader - Jonathan's horror increasingly shifts from his own survival to the consequences of Dracula reaching England. The Count becomes an 'inverse coloniser' and a symbolic representation of many xenophobic fears at the time: an ancient Eastern aristocrat carrying death into the imperial centre, where he intends to establish a growing population of vampires among London's millions.
"Mina is a woman, and there is nought in common." - Jonathan's outburst separates Mina completely from the vampire women, presenting one as the ideal of loving humanity and the others as monstrous parodies of femininity. Modern readers often note that this reflects Victorian ideals of womanhood while simultaneously underscoring the novel's recurring contrast between nurturing love and predatory appetite. Jonathan's remark reflects a Victorian ideal of womanhood—one that separates Mina from the Brides by treating nurturing, chastity, and self-sacrifice as "true" femininity while casting female sexual agency as something inhuman.
"At its foot a man may sleep—as a man." - Jonathan's final words acknowledge suicide as preferable to vampiric transformation without explicitly embracing it. For a Victorian Christian, self-inflicted death carried profound theological implications, yet Jonathan believes preserving his humanity—and perhaps his soul—would be preferable to becoming one of Dracula's undead servants. Jonathan's final words echo Hamlet's meditation on death as "sleep," a comparison he has already invited earlier in the novel by quoting the play directly. Throughout his imprisonment, sleep has become a state of profound vulnerability: it is during sleep that he loses time, is moved without his knowledge, and may be subjected to Dracula's predation. His hope that he might "sleep—as a man" therefore expresses a preference for an ordinary human death under God's mercy over the unnatural, violated existence of vampiric undeath.
Dracula's Rejuvenation - Dracula's dramatically renewed appearance invites an unsettling question: whose blood has restored him? Although the novel never confirms it, many readers infer that Jonathan himself has been Dracula's unseen victim, especially in light of the Count's repeated claims that "This man belongs to me," Jonathan's unexplained periods of unconsciousness, and the promise that "To-night is mine." If so, Jonathan is not merely witnessing Dracula's transformation—he may be looking at his own stolen vitality made visible on the Count's face, reinforcing his desperate resolve to die "as a man" rather than become the monster's food, property, or creation.
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If you would like further clarifications or explanations on anything that people said or did in this chapter please leave a reply on this post or send me a message directly, and be sure to say which chapter it’s in!
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I sometimes remember Anno Dracula when I go here— Looking back, the books and graphic novels are not good or fun. And none of the featured vampires feel like themselves, do they? I get changing characters to flesh them out, but if only the names remain then what’s the point? The human main characters are more interesting. The plots are mid, and for all its gore, nudity and “grown-up” posturing, it is ultimately wishy-washy.
Because AD relies on classic horror, yet the author’s chosen vampires can opt out of the uncomfy parts. For instance, Kate Reed (scrapped Stoker character) feels a sexualized temptation around blood after she turns, but she resists it. She feeds on packed blood snacks, privately, as she finds any public feeding shameful. I couldn’t help noticing that female vampires who sexily feed on randos and enjoy it end up murdered. In a sequel, Kostaki sheds his entire identity, abstains from blood forever, and represses his dark nature which he loathes with a vegetarian substitute. Literally. Lord Ruthven is a harmless gloat. Geneviève Dieudonné fights evil and feeds only ethically and sparingly. Unlike the Carpathian vampires, she does not turn into beasts or go feral. Instead, her “purer” French royal vampiric bloodline gives her greater control— which is why she easily defeats them. She hates problematic “Truly Dead” vampires who give into “The Red Thirst,” feeds in tiny drops from her willing partner, legally, and she patronizes blood banks. But. Why use classic vampire mains if you want “ethical vampires”? They are from gothic fiction. Just make an immortal superhero OC with a silver allergy fighting baddies. I love the idea of a literary vampireverse, learning about the old stories, their influence, their historical contexts, and potential ways to adapt/retell/mix them. But AD is not good. ...I have feelings about this series clearly
my greatest anno dracula Hot Take is that it doesn't deserve the title of "ultimate literary vampire crossover". In fact, it cares so little about any of the literary vampire pack that I hesitate to call it a literary vampire crossover at all. That's not the story Kim Newman wanted to write; it's not the story he's interested in telling. He got the idea to write a story in which Jack Seward and Jack the Ripper are the same person, and constructed all of his shoddy worldbuilding around propping up that premise.
unorganized ranting under the cut; cw for discussion of xenophobia, misogyny, disordered eating, homophobia, and also me losing my cool and yelling a lot
i knew about a bunch of the blood drinking stuff but this bit with kate reed is new to me. it's funny how for as edgy a series as this clearly wants to be, it's too chicken to make any of its vampire protagonists morally gray in regards to blood drinking. like damn, man, if i wanted vampires with nothing i'd go read twilight, and then i wouldn't have to feel my blood pressure rise another two points every time kostaki's name appears on the page attached to a character who is as much his opposite as it is possible to get. but the actual lore around the blood drinking is batshit. apparently copstaki (i refuse to call newman's character anything else) finds out that he actually becomes stronger when he abstains from blood. at the time i learned about this i was like "what is this, some nofap shit?" given the detail about kate reed, apparently yes???
my biggest gripe with all this stupid shit around the blood drinking, though, is the way it evolves throughout the story, because it is initially framed as a physical need—you know, the way it is in 19th century vampire fiction—before copstaki discovers the magic of nofap. hold on where's the quote
As a vampire elder, he discovered he grew stronger through starvation. Dracula's get knew something they never talked of. They drank human blood not because they needed to, but because they wanted to. Needing was no shame. Wanting was weakness.
I HATE THIS FRAMING. SO MUCH. oh my god oh my FUCKING god if you are going to tell a vampire story in which blood drinking is framed as a temptation/addiction rather than a physical need, YOU NEED TO WRITE IT THAT WAY FROM THE START. otherwise, what you have written is a story in which having an eating disorder is framed as the morally correct choice.
also, much smaller gripe, but "needing was no shame" is a stupid cop-out. incredible amounts of privilege and entitlement shining through. plenty of needs are shameful. needing to hurt other human beings in order to survive is shameful. that is, dare i say, The Whole Point. but rather than tackle the moral complexity of that and take all the FREE CHARACTER ANGST that results from having to do something awful in order to survive, he just has his protagonist conveniently discover that the defining feature of vampirism is, in fact, optional, which allows him to sort every character into Morally Pure Abstinent Paragons and Icky Degenerate Blood Perverts and avoid all those nasty moral and ethical quandaries, because god forbid this work of horror vampire fiction have moral grayness in it.
SPEAKING OF "DEGENERACY" kim newman hates eastern europeans so fucking much it's actually insane. Oh your Carpathian characters are all more savage and bestial and prone to "degeneration" while your English and French characters have "purer" bloodlines and stronger minds and greater self-control? Why don't you start comparing their fucking skull shapes while you're at it. Jesus Christ. And of course in this story the Icky Degenerate Easterners stage a violent takeover of England and the Heroic English Resistance must bravely fight back against their savage oppressors. Not only is this story more racist than the original Dracula, it's in direct competition with The Beetle.
oh and don't forget about the misogyny!! welcome to my Dracula fanfic with cameos from other literary vampires where we simply MUST conform 100% to the strict letter of Carmilla canon, no bringing her back from the dead, it is simply impossible, the book said she died so she's dead. Oh Kostaki? Yeah he's 400 years old and a cop. So instead of Carmilla who do we get? Her mother, a formidable, mysterious, and manipulative vampire who was left alive at the end of the book? Lmao no, Random Male Relative. What about Clarimonde? Well, she's not in this series. Kim will reference her name one (1) time in the title of a play, though, just so you know he COULD have put her in and specifically chose not to. Female suffering, framed through a titillating lens, is milked for shock value (it's not just all the violently murdered sex workers, it's shit like dracula parading queen victoria around on a leash like a dog, supposedly treating her like the rest of his vampire "harem" even though that is extremely not how the weird sisters are treated in Dracula proper). But everyone bends over backwards to give him brownie points for including Kate Reed, even though nothing I've heard about her character so far gives me any reason to believe he's taken her in a direction worth reading.
To bring this back around Kim's (lack of) use of literary vampires, he clearly doesn't want to, or at least he doesn't care about them one way or another. Varney doesn't appear; he gets a couple of dismissive offhand mentions and that's it. Kostaki, despite what you've heard, does not appear either. I don't know who the fuck that bootlicking loser is in Newman's book, but it sure isn't Kostaki. Gorcha, Azzo, and Vardalek are all unrecognizable, because Kim assumes no one in his audience will have actually read their stories to call him on his mischaracterization—or else, again, he doesn't care. I will draw and quarter him for what he did to Vardalek. I don't even really want to defend Vardalek but what Kim did with him is beyond the pale. The entire concept of the "Carpathian Guard" is laughable and spits in the face of every character he ropes into it, but especially Vardalek, who is not remotely Carpathian by any stretch of the imagination. Why is he in there, then? Homophobia. Vardalek is the series' only gay character; he's also a child predator (a description which, frankly, does not even begin to describe his portrayal in the series, but I'd really rather not get into that topic). Kim also doesn't care about the lore of ANY of these books, INCLUDING DRACULA ITSELF. We've talked about the blood thing, but you know what else? You know what kills vampires in this worthless hack of a series? SUNLIGHT AND SILVER. Basically the ONLY two things in modern vampire lore that have ZERO basis in ANY literary work. Because fuck you, that's why. The series is also full of references to a bunch of other, more recent pop culture vampires, as well as a bunch of non-vampire literature cameos; it seems like all this shit is only there to score points with readers who get excited every time a story references another story.
In conclusion, if you want a book which mixes together a bunch of literary vampires, read Vivian Shaw's Strange Practice.
i want to paint i want to spin yarn i want to do pottery and bookbinding and soapmaking and needlefelting and embroidery and breadmaking and biscuit decorating and and and
oh and quilting and wood carving and gardening and making jewellery and play an instrument and dance and sing in a choir and flower arranging and! so many ways to make art and so little time!!
"we cut the nobody scene from the odyssey" "we cut the religious trauma and parental abuse from carrie" i'm starting to think that studios barely funding original films is starting to have an effect where directors make up a story and then slap an IP on it in order to sell. or maybe some bitches just can't read anymore idk it's one or the other
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Watched a documentary about abuse and advice one guy said to give children was, "Tell them that if someone is hurting them, to tell someone - and don't just tell one person. Tell as many people as possible, and keep telling as many people as possible until the abuse stops." and i really liked that
Bc so many ppl focus on the idea of telling A Trusted Adult, but even a well-meaning individual can fuck up and let abuse fall through the cracks or not know what to do
Whereas if a child tells LOADS of adults AND other kids, there's far less opportunity for an abuser to do damage control
Consistently telling their story and spreading it around disempowers the abuser to control and coerce the flow of information, or to utilise gaps and weaknesses in systems of reporting or welfare to isolate the child
Just really good advice. Not suprised I don't hear it more often.
i just found out about this bird (scale-crested pygmy tyrant) trying to find the most biodiverse countries and i feel tears welling up in my eyes because its so cute
why does it look like that i love him so much he's a little fella
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i
I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).
Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.
He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.
Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.
All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!
So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.
Dracula is full of details that put it in what was at the time an incredibly modern time frame, which only isn't obvious to readers now because it's been more than a hundred years. A few off the top of my head:
Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.
Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.
Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.
Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.
Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.
When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.
Jonathan literally makes a comment in Chapter 3 about the surreal contrasting modernity of sitting at an antique desk in an ancient castle and frantically scribbling steganographic shorthand in his notebook.
There's a bit where Harker goes to the Aerated Bread Company for lunch, a chain of tearooms that opened in the UK in the 1860's and that made bread bread with carbonated water as leavening to make bread more quickly and cleanly.
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today I learned that in 2008, the city council of florence overturned dante’s sentence of execution if he returned from exile. yes, dante’s inferno dante, who died in 1321.
but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.
the funniest part is that the vote was 19-5. five people voted to uphold dante’s exile.
The objectively funniest part of this is actually that the city that holds his remains, Ravenna, refused to give his remains back. This was a ploy from florence to have his remains moved back for the tourist money and its been ongoing for a long time. Florence had a fake tomb built in the city to trick people into visiting, and have tried to force the return of the remains.
His actual caretakers have been very steadfast in keeping them hidden, moved, or generally out of reach to respect his choice in life to never, ever, ever return to florence, even when he was first offered the chance to return. This is at this point an almost millenium long feud that florence is really, really mad about losing
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every other case Watson is like "can I come along? unless I am nothing but dead weight to you. In which case I brought a hammer for you to beat me to death with." and Holmes always replies something along the lines of "You are my bestest friend and if you came along that would make me the happiest man in the world. Pack your gun." peace and love. also what is wrong with them.
