going through an awkward phase from 12-29

my daughter cannot, through action or inaction, harm a human or allow a human to come to harm

a daughter at rest or in constant motion remains at rest or in constant motion unless acted upon by another force

daughters are never created or destroyed, only transformed

always treat every daughter as loaded, even if you know she isn't

The entire plot happens because Dracula is a teaboo

A character proposes marriage with a scalpel in hand and keeps playing with it throughout the conversation

Dracula roasts a chicken

A vampire bat (not a vampire) somehow drinks enough of a horse's blood to cause the horse to collapse

Dracula gets smacked in the face with a shovel

After attributing nightmares to paprika consumption, a character eats more paprika for breakfast

The heroes hire a locksmith to make their home invasion look more respectable

To prepare for raiding a vampire's lair, one character brings three small dogs

A character laments being unable to wed multiple people at once

A therapist starts speculating about elephants' souls mid-session

An official cause of death is written as "misadventure in falling from bed"

Dracula has a Krampus-esque sack that he shoves children into

A character realizes that his host has no reflection but is more concerned with shaving than investigating that

A reporter brags about his running speed mid-article

Dracula, while trying to maintain a low profile, goes by the incredibly subtle alias "de Ville"

A character is misled by phonetic spelling

A character receives three marriage proposals in one day

The SPCA tries to adopt Dracula

A doctor refers to a patient as his "pet lunatic"

We are told vampires can be defeated by putting branches on their coffins

A character gets slashed at with a knife and loot splatters on the floor, like a video game NPC

Dracula is a horsegirl

A character brings anti-vampire flowers but doesn't tell anyone the purpose of said anti-vampire flowers, which leads to another character moving them and enabling a vampire attack

A character's hair turns from dark to white literally overnight

Twice in the novel, Dracula says "Bah!" The second time is his final line of dialogue

A character has ominous nightmares and attributes them to eating too much paprika

Dracula first appears wearing a fake beard

The person he was trying to fool with the fake beard immediately realizes Dracula and Beard Guy are the same man, due to both having really firm handshakes

We are told parrots are immortal unless fatally wounded

A Texan cowboy opens fire on a bat flitting around a window, and lodges a bullet in the wall of an occupied room

A woman is called a polyandrist for receiving blood transfusions from multiple men

An incorrectly addressed telegram leads to two deaths, multiple druggings, and several children being assaulted

Dracula, while trying to maintain a low profile, takes a lovely trip to the zoo and freaks out the animals so badly that he gets mentioned in a newspaper article

The one character who knows anything about vampires spends a good two-thirds of the book refusing to talk about vampires

Dracula went to Satan's Witchcraft Academy and somehow this is only brought up in two throwaway lines

A character gets stuck inside a circle of communion wafer crumbs

A major plot point of the book is Dracula (who was said to be a brilliant scholar and has the strength of twenty mortal men) realizing he can move boxes without human help

Someone is referred to as "manifestly a prig of the first water"

Two characters have a hobby of reading train schedules

A hospital lets a mental patient escape to see what will happen

A character starts vomiting up feathers from eating whole birds

A doctor refuses to give a medical diagnosis and instead makes a speech about growing corn

Dracula impersonates another character just by wearing the same clothes, despite being taller and visibly much older. This deception is successful.

A character "cleans" a room by eating all the insects in it

Suddenly: rats. Thousands of them.

The heroes progress in their efforts through "the wonderful power of money," i.e., bribery

Dracula has three other vampires in his castle. Their relation to him is never explained, nor are any of them named.

A character insists his salvation depends on having a pet cat

Dracula is thwarted by flowers on more than one occasion

A group of vampires stand in the hall outside a man's bedroom, talking loudly about their plans to eat him. When he comes to the door to confront them, they run away laughing

Dracula wears an unfashionable hat and gets roasted for it

A group of Romanians encounter a disheveled, shouting man and, "seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they [give] him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither that the train reached."

A boat crashes due to Dracula having the munchies

A wolf is thrown through a window and immediately runs off, confused and covered in glass

I think the idea is supposed to be that Sam is trapped in a world of fiction and unreality, he's literally been transported to inside a world that's like a TV show. In the Life on Mars? song that is the namesake of the story, it's about the "girl with the mousy hair" escaping from the world into fiction and fantasy, to escape from a hard life, and the way in which fantasy is shaped by the media around us. There's a lot of imagery across the series of Sam looking and talking into TV screens, and he's repeatedly haunted by the Test Card Girl, who is the image that the episode finishes on. Sure it's not a nice fantasy, it's violent and loud and full of death and general calamity, but it's a world where Sam gets to be special, gets to be different. When he briefly returns to the real world during the finale, it's grey, it's dull, and he's lost his ability to feel anything at all, and in the end he opts to fully embrace the fantasy. It's bittersweet because Sam is choosing to not life in any part of the real world, but it's a little happy as well because, well, we the audience want the fantasy too.