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collection of diary entries, newspaper accounts, letters, and even telegrams. During his lifetime, Stoker was known less as an author and more as the success- ful theatre manager he was. He ran the Ly- ceum Theatre in London, and represented actor Henry Irving, who was like the George Clooney of his day. Writing novels was just a way to make a little extra cash, and Dracula followed a pretty typical monster adventure formula that was popular in its day. (He basi- cally wrote a Marvel movie, complete with the heroes punching the bad guy at the end.) He drew on vampire folklore but really just wrote one hell of a thriller. The story involves one Jonathan Harker, an English lawyer retained by a Transylva- nian count named Dracula, who is seeking to buy a home in London. Harker, while at Dracula’s castle, encounters three lady vam- pires and barely escapes with his life. He ends up hospitalized. The count, meanwhile, his real estate paperwork squared away, sets sail for England. From here it’s a bit of a melodrama with Dracula, on arrival, turn- ing Harker’s fiancee’s best friend, Lucy, into a vampire. (The process is basically this: You get bit. You get sick. You die. You rise from the grave pale-skinned and thirsty for blood.) A professor named Abraham Van Helsing diagnoses Lucy’s condition. She dies but is later caught stalking children. Van Hel- sing and the Scooby Gang find her, stake her, stuff garlic in her mouth (garlic!) and bury her. Harker, back from the hospital, reveals

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