Dracula
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.
Book Entry · Horror
What is Fevre Dream about?
Mississippi, 1857: ruined steamboat captain Abner Marsh accepts a devil's-bargain partnership with the pale, nocturnal aristocrat Joshua York — unlimited funds to build the fastest boat on the river, no questions about the night stops. York is a vampire, but the twist is his project: a synthesised substitute for blood and a one-man reformation of his predatory species, opposed by the plantation-bred vampire Damon Julian, who regards humanity as cattle and reform as blasphemy. Marsh — fat, ugly, honest and brave — is one of Martin's finest creations, and the riverboat race against Julian's corrupted Fevre Dream is the book's heart-stopper.
Why it matters
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.
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