Fevre Dream
Widely rated among the best vampire novels of the century — Martin's pre-Westeros masterpiece, demonstrating the moral-greyness machinery a decade before A Game of Thrones, and a clear ancestor of the sympathetic-vampire mainstream.
Book Entry · Horror
What is Dracula about?
Solicitor Jonathan Harker travels to the Carpathians to close a property deal and finds his client crawling head-first down the castle wall. Count Dracula's relocation to England — pursued through ships' logs, diaries, phonograph recordings and newspaper clippings — becomes a duel between the ancient undead and a syndicate of modern professionals led by the Dutch polymath Van Helsing. Stoker's epistolary structure gives the supernatural a documentary credibility, and his Count, mostly off-stage, dominates every page he isn't on. Mina Harker, typewriter in hand, quietly runs the entire counter-offensive.
Why it matters
The most influential horror novel in the language: the source code for vampire fiction and a permanent fixture of world culture, from Nosferatu and the Lugosi and Lee films onward.
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