Dracula's Guest
Bram Stoker (1847–1912), 1914
★ 3.77 from 13.6k ratings on Goodreads
A posthumous collection of Stoker's uncanny tales: haunted judges, sea rescues, quicksand doubles and one very patient cat. Gothic horror in short, sharp doses. A gathering of gothic tales that moves from creeping dread to sudden unease, told in a formal, deliberate voice.
Feels like dread, unease and curiosity. About death, madness and power.
Who it’s for
You may like this if you enjoy short horror pieces with haunted figures, sea rescues and strange doubles. Some stories carry the slower, formal cadence of Victorian prose, and the collection is a mixed gathering rather than one sustained novel.
Why read it
These tales show Stoker working the same gothic nerve as Dracula in compact forms, offering dread, oddity and a few striking images without a long commitment.
Pages from the book
You walk toward your own double across a quicksand.
One night his dream was so vivid that when he awoke he could not believe that it had only been a dream. He shut his eyes again and again, but each time the vision, if it was a vision, or the reality, if it was a reality, would rise before him. The moon was shining full and yellow over the quicksand as he approached it; he could see the expanse of light shaken and disturbed and full of black shadows as the liquid sand quivered and trembled and wrinkled and eddied as was its wont between its pauses of marble calm. As he drew close to it another figure came towards it from the opposite side with equal footsteps. The night when the dead are said to walk, and you are alone.
Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad—when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone—unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright. A wife listens to her husband digging in the cellar at night.
With a chill in her heart—for the harshness of her husband’s voice was new to her—she crept back to bed and lay there trembling, too frightened to cry, and listened to every sound. There was a long pause of silence, and then the sound of some iron implement striking muffled blows! Then there came a clang of a heavy stone falling, followed by a muffled curse. Then a dragging sound, and then more noise of stone on stone. She lay all the while in an agony of fear, and her heart beat dreadfully. She heard a curious sort of scraping sound; and then there was silence. Presently the door opened gently, and Geoffrey appeared. His wife pretended to be asleep; but through her eyelashes she saw him wash from his hands something white that looked like lime. Bram Stoker.Bram Stoker managed actor Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre for twenty-seven years; he wrote Dracula while running the theatre's business and touring with Irving.
Books that feel like this
More by Bram Stoker
Dracula
Bram Stoker, 1897
A solicitor's business trip, a seaside storm and a doctor's case notes, told through diaries, letters and telegrams so that dread reads like found evidence.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Dracula's Guest for me?
- You may like this if you enjoy short horror pieces with haunted figures, sea rescues and strange doubles. Some stories carry the slower, formal cadence of Victorian prose, and the collection is a mixed gathering rather than one sustained novel.
- What is Dracula's Guest like?
- A gathering of gothic tales that moves from creeping dread to sudden unease, told in a formal, deliberate voice. Feels like dread, unease and curiosity. About death, madness and power.
- What should I read after Dracula's Guest?
- If you liked Dracula's Guest, try In a Glass Darkly, v. 1/3 (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu), The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole) and Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (M. R. James).
A taste of the feed
Watch a man talk himself out of his own remorse.
Manfred, though persuaded, like his wife, that the vision had been no work of fancy, recovered a little from the tempest of mind into which so many strange events had thrown him. Ashamed, too, of his inhuman treatment of a Princess who returned every injury with new marks of tenderness and duty, he felt returning love forcing itself into his eyes; but not less ashamed of feeling remorse towards one against whom he was inwardly meditating a yet more bitter outrage, he curbed the yearnings of his heart, and did not dare to lean even towards pity. The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy.
The Castle of Otranto · Horace Walpole
The sound the earth makes when it has been at war too long.
How was it that we had not heard it before! From everywhere—the exact place could not be defined—a groan, unbroken and scraping, wonderfully calm in its breadth, and even indifferent, as it seemed, was borne upon us. We had heard many cries and groans, but this resembled none of those heard before. On the dim reddish surface our eyes could perceive nothing, and therefore the very earth and sky, lit up by a never-rising sun, seemed to be groaning.
Short Fiction · Leonid Andreyev
When a friend's idea is so strange you start diagnosing him.
I think it was at that moment that I first began to entertain doubts as to Robin’s sanity. Not that people dining near would have noticed anything amiss with him: his voice was low-pitched and quiet. But the whole idea was so utterly far-fetched and fantastic that I couldn’t help wondering if his brilliant brain hadn’t crossed that tiny bridge which separates genius from insanity. I knew the hideous loathing he had always felt for war: was it possible that continual brooding on the idea had unhinged him?
The Final Count · H. C. McNeile
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