Restless Classics presents Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece of horror, gorgeously illustrated by Kaitlin Chan and with a new introduction and foreword by award-winning authors Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Alexander Chee.
Since its original publication in 1897, Dracula has spoken aloud some of our deepest cultural anxieties: fear of sexuality, xenophobia, homophobia, and distrust of The Other. One of the most recognizable and pervasive characters ever written, Stoker’s Count Dracula is much more terrifying than the caped and fanged representation that has grown so familiar. The Count’s menace lies not solely in his deadly bloodlust, but also in his harrowing ability to hide his malfeasance behind power and privilege.
When Jonathan Harker unearths Count Dracula’s (un)deadly secret, he unwittingly starts a war between good and evil with disastrous repercussions. The innocent Lucy Westenra falls prey to the vampire’s curse, Mina Harker narrowly escapes a vicious transformation, and the indefatigable Abraham Van Helsing risks life and afterlife to defeat his archnemesis. As Silvia Moreno-Garcia explores in her new introduction, this outbreak of an ancient threat in a modern world introduced a radical new element to vampire folklore, one which has only gained significance in the twenty-first century: vampires as disease-bearing victims of the same chaos that they spread.
In his new foreword, Alexander Chee grounds the novel in the potential queerness of Stoker’s literary circle, and delves into our growing fascination with, and affection for, both the horror genre and its monsters. Dracula is both a resonant contemplation of the unknown and a cautionary reminder that evil doesn’t always announce itself with bats and coffins; it lurks within the normal and the mundane, just waiting to be invited in.
Bram Stoker was an Irish author of nearly twenty novels, best known for his gothic horror novel Dracula. Educated at Trinity College in Dublin, he joined the Civil Service before becoming the personal assistant of Henry Irving and manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London.
Kaitlin Chan is a cartoonist and cultural worker based in Hong Kong. She is the co-founder of Queer Reads Library, a mobile library centering queer perspectives in diasporic communities. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker online, The Margins, Popula, ArtAsiaPacific and the Hong Kong Visual Arts Yearbook, amongst others.
Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR, his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, T Magazine, The Sewaneee Review, and the 2016 and 2019 Best American Essays. He was the guest editor of Best American Essays 2022. He is a full professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Velvet Was the Night, Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade and Shadow, and many other books. She has won the Locus and British Fantasy awards for her work as a novelist, and the World Fantasy Award as an editor.
