The New Annotated Dracula

Average Rating: 4.0 Stars
by Bram Stoker

List Price: $39.95
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Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.
ISBN: 0393064506

Product Description

Cause for international celebration—the most important and complete edition of Dracula in decades.

In his first work since his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Leslie S. Klinger returns with this spectacular, lavishly illustrated homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula. With a daring conceit, Klinger accepts Stoker's contention that the Dracula tale is based on historical fact. Traveling through two hundred years of popular culture and myth as well as graveyards and the wilds of Transylvania, Klinger's notes illuminate every aspect of this haunting narrative (including a detailed examination of the original typescript of Dracula, with its shockingly different ending, previously unavailable to scholars). Klinger investigates the many subtexts of the original narrative—from masochistic, necrophilic, homoerotic, "dentophilic," and even heterosexual implications of the story to its political, economic, feminist, psychological, and historical threads. Employing the superb literary detective skills for which he has become famous, Klinger mines this 1897 classic for nuggets that will surprise even the most die-hard Dracula fans and introduce the vampire-prince to a new generation of readers.

Customer Reviews

Which includes a review from the New Yorker
5 Stars
I got this for christmas and is my second Annotated Dracula book (I sold the other one, by Leonard Wolf, after reading this one). By far this is the best annotated take to Stoker's novel. It posits the possibility that Dracula indeed existed and that Stoker is in collusion with the Count against Harker, et al. I found this great article on the New Yorker, which I think summarizes this incredible edition perfectly:

"Leslie Klinger, in his new annotated edition, claims that he has fresh material to go on. He has examined Stoker's typescript, which is owned by a "private collector." This source, he says, has yielded "startling results." In fact, like McNally and Florescu with Stoker's working notes, Klinger draws no important conclusions from his archival discovery, and he admits that he spent only two days studying the typescript. As with the McNally-Florescu version, however, the real sales angle of this edition is not a new source but a new theory. Klinger not only assumes, like Leatherdale, that all the events narrated in the novel are factual; he offers a hypothesis as to how Stoker came to publish them. Here goes. Harker, a real person (with a changed name), like everyone else in the book, gave his diary, together with the other documents that constitute the novel, to Bram Stoker so that Stoker might alert the English public that a vampire named Dracula, also real, was in their midst. Stoker agreed to issue the warning. But then Dracula got wind of this plan, whereupon he contacted Stoker and used on him the methods of persuasion famously at his disposal. Dracula decided that it was too late to suppress the Harker documents entirely, so instead he forced Stoker to distort them. He sat at the desk with Stoker and co-authored the novel, changing the facts in such a way as to convince the public that Dracula had been eliminated. That way, the Count could go on, unmolested, with his project of taking over the world.

Many of Klinger's fifteen hundred notes are devoted to revealing this plot. When Stoker makes a continuity error, or fails to supply verifiable information, this is part of the coverup. The book says that Dracula's London house is at 347 Piccadilly, but in the eighteen-nineties the only houses on that stretch of Piccadilly that would have answered Stoker's description were at 138 and 139. Clearly, Klinger says, Stoker is protecting the Count. Then, there's a problem about the hotel where Van Helsing is staying. In Chapter 9 it's the Great Eastern; in Chapter 11 it's the Berkeley. Again, Klinger concludes, Stoker is covering his characters' traces. He altered the name of the hotel--presumably, he had to prevent readers from running over to the place and checking the register--but then he forgot and changed the name again.

At first, you think that maybe Klinger's book is not actually an annotated edition of "Dracula" but, rather, like Nabokov's "Pale Fire," a novel about a paranoid, in the form of an annotated edition. But no: Klinger, in his introduction, lays out his conspiracy theory without qualification. So are we to understand that he himself is a maniac, whose delusions the editors at Norton thought it might be interesting to publish?

No again. Preceding Klinger's introduction there is a little note, titled "Editor's Preface"--exactly the kind of thing that readers would skip--in which he tells us that his great hypothesis is a "gentle fiction." (He used a similar contrivance, he says, in his Sherlock Holmes edition.) Recently, in a book-tour appearance at the New York Public Library, Klinger again admitted that his theory was a game. "If you like that sort of thing, there's a lot of that in there," he said. April fool!

That's too bad, first, because it means that a serious novel has been taken as a species of camp, and, second, because it discredits Klinger's non-joke, scholarly footnotes, of which there are many, and carefully researched. Even after the other annotated editions, this volume gives us useful information. Maybe we didn't need to be told what Dover is, or the Bosporus, but when Klinger writes about the rise of the New Woman, or about the popularity of spiritualism in the late nineteenth century, this gives us knowledge that Victorian readers would have brought to the novel, and which could help us. It won't, though, because readers, having had their chain pulled by the conspiracy theory, will disregard those notes, if, improbably, they have bought the book. Every generation, it seems, gets the annotated "Dracula" that it deserves. This is the postmodern version: playful, "performative," with a smiling disdain for any claim of truth. It found the perfect author. A tax attorney would know about gentle fictions."

-In the Blood
Why do vampires still thrill?, New Yorker.
by Joan Acocella
March 16, 2009


~ J. Burgos, West Hollywood, CA United States
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To much inecesary information, but interesting
5 Stars
To much inecesary information, but interesting... a good explanation and back ground of the history of dracula, all the events thad make this character uno of the best (or the best) fictional horror character, you don't need to know more, simpy amazing.
~ Irene Mireles Camacho, Guadalajara, Jal. México
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Well researched, but the 'gentle fiction' is very distracting.
3 Stars
I've always wanted to read Dracula, and I've thoroughly enjoyed the other annotated versions in this series. I've also been eyeing editor Leslie Klinger's three-volume annotated Sherlock Holmes for a while. Upon seeing this edition in a book store, I thought that a little hand-holding and behind-the-scenes insight would make this a fun read.

While this book is both gorgeous and thorough, and I applaud Klinger's exhaustive efforts, I was surprised and disappointed upon discovering that in both this edition and the Sherlock Holmes series, he employs the 'gentle fiction' that the stories are based on actual fact while preparing his annotations.

For me, being a casual but curious reader, an annotated edition should be a one-stop-shop to discover the facts behind the tales, without the reader having to do research. Instead I found that these four books superimpose the idea that they are based on true events. At first I thought I could just ignore the superfluous annotations (which would have trimmed or altered them by a full quarter.) But as I got further into it, they are not so easily ignored. There came a grey area where I began to wonder if what I was distilling from the fictionalized annotation was even close to the facts. For example, at one point early on it is insinuated that the story didn't actually happen in Transylvania, and that this was simply a cover up contrived by Stoker. I would instead have been more interested to know that Stoker had considered other locales and what course he took to finally choose Transylvania. Unfortunately, I may never know without reading a future annotated edition which dispenses with the 'true story' fiction, or without reading the other books mentioned and used by Klinger. Being a casual reader of Dracula I have no interest in delving into these other works and had instead hoped to discover more from this edition.

Another reviewer has stated that Klinger must not like Dracula, and I have to say that clearly he must love this book with all the efforts he put into it. However, the annotations do come across a bit on the terse side, even chastising Stoker at times, certainly when taking the stance that Stoker altered the original words of the players. I can imagine that to sustain the fiction that the story is in fact true must have been a monumental task for Klinger, but these accomplishments are lost on this reader. On a lesser note, it was a little distracting that Sherlock Holmes seemed to be mentioned so often in the annotations. I'd also like to note that the publishers did a disservice in their reproduction of Klinger's once-beautiful photographs. They are often dark, lacking contrast and detail.

Dracula was an enjoyable book, and Klinger's insight was thorough. Unfortunately, while this edition could have been the de facto annotated edition of Dracula, by taking the position that this is a true story, the editor has ensured that the book will sit merely as a curiosity until such time that his annotations can be re-edited to remove the 'gentle fiction.'

~ M. Bean,
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