The New Annotated Dracula

(Author), (Editor, Contributor), Neil Gaiman (Introduction), Janet Byrne (Contributor)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Klinger brings the same impressive breadth of knowledge that distinguished The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes to this definitive examination of one of the classic horror novels of all time. Adopting the conceit that Stoker's narrative is based on fact, Klinger elucidates the plot and historical context for both Stoker devotees and those more familiar with Count Dracula from countless popular culture versions. Because he had privileged access to the typescript Stoker delivered to his publisher, Klinger is able to note changes between it and the first edition and comment on the reasons for them. Through close reading, Klinger raises questions about such matters as the role of lead vampire-hunter Van Helsing and whether the villainous count is actually dispatched at book's end. An introduction by Neil Gaiman, numerous illustrations, essays on topics ranging from Dracula in the movies to the academic response, and much more enhance the package. 8-city author tour. (Oct.)
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Review

Leslie S. Klinger’s great virtue as an editor is his sublimely willful and scrupulous disregard for the boundary between historical fact and literary falsehood. In The New Annotated Dracula, he reprises the same earlier annotated Sherlock Holmes, treating Stoker’s novel as nonfiction: real events happening to real persons. After a brief preface in which he explains his trick, Klinger’s edition becomes a surreal treat, book’s succession of journal entries and letters. (BookPage )

This is a book every serious reader of the horror genre should have on his or her shelf. You will read Dracula with new eyes. Fascinating! (Stephen King )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 672 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (October 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393064506
• ISBN-13: 978-0393064506
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8.9 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #80,597 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Well researched, but the 'gentle fiction' is more than distracting., February 22, 2009

By	M. Bean - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.'

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars BEWARE., July 7, 2009

By	Andrew Babino "Batfan27" (Gotham City, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I just purchased THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA for the tidy price of $40, overcome with the desire to seek out and purchase the definitive edition of what may very well be the greatest horror story ever told. DRACULA has been in continuous publication since its debut in 1897, and that fact alone is a testament to the narrative's (like its primary protagonist's) immortality.

So did this edition measure up?

No.

Why?

Well, first of all, let me just say that by no means does this edition claim to be anything it is not--the sinlge most exhaustively annotated version of DRACULA ever. A good third of the book is entirely removed from the novel altogether, including prefaces and introductions in front of it, and numerous, NUMEROUS appendecies and afterwords after it.

However, that aside, I cannot really sanction this as the best version of DRACULA ever published, as many of the press reviews printed on the back of the jacket will tell you.

I have two main problems with this edition.

First of all, the lesser problem is that of the annotation itself. If you're the kind of fastidious person I like to think I am, you'll want to sit and read through every note on every page. Once you get through the first page of the novel, however, you'll have most likely changed your mind about that. I took me no less than two hours to read all the way through the preface, introduction, and introductory essay THE CONTEXT OF DRACULA before I even got to the novel, at which point I spent another half hour reading every single notation and, feeling really freakin' tired by this point, came to the somewhat depressing realization that I had only gotten through the first page of the novel.

The problem is that this edition is so heavily, HEAVILY annotated that it's virtually impossible to keep track of the actual narrative if you bother to read all the notes, which can go on for pages all on their own, and number up to three or four in a single sentence. However, it should be said that this is nothing less than I suppose you'd expect to find in the most heavily annotated version of DRACULA ever published; still, I found I was a little unprepared for the work that went into reading it.

My second problem, and my main problem, with this edition is that it proceeds under the ludicrous concept that DRACULA is not a work of fiction, but in fact a collection of real documents edited together by Stoker himself.

Oh yes. You read that right.

Right from the preface, Leslie Klinger the author of the notes and the novel's supplementary material, tells us that he will be annotating DRACULA as though it were a real story. When I first read this, it seemed like and interesting idea, and I was curious to see just how he would go about doing it. Unfortunately for myself, I was not pleased to find out.

Klinger goes on to say that Bram Stoker actually knew the Harker characters socially, and, having learned of their horrifying tale and believing that Dracula was not destroyed, resolved to publish their papers in order to warn the world of the threat of vampires, at which point Count Dracula himself appeared to Stoker and forced him to make changes to the narrative so as to make it seem more ficticious and to misinform the public about vampires, in order to protect himself from reprocussions.

Once again, I assure you that you read that right.

In taking this preposterous approach, Klinger not only effectively nullifies his own notations, making all that excessive reading pointless since it proceeds from a ficticious concept anyway, but also actually manages to lessen the effect of the novel as a great work of fiction. By taking the authorship away from Stoker and placing it in the hands of people who have never existed, you destroy that which makes DRACULA so remarkable in the first place: it is a book crafted out of a mightily massive mess of vampiric folklore and mythology combined with the social climate of the Victorian era as well as Stoker's own love of Gothic horror and the macabre. It may be difficult to believe that a simple Irish scholar could have crafted the single most influential piece of horror literature in history on his own, but it's sure as hell a lot easier to swallow than the idea that a 500-year-old vampire helped him do it.

Overall, this edition is NOT the way to read DRACULA if you've never read it before. I can only reccomend this to those who already know the novel inside and out, and want to know even more while toying with the possibility that it really could have happened. Which, incidentally, it didn't.

I honestly got more out of thumbing through the $4 pocket-sized paperback edition of DRACULA I first read when I was 10 than I got from dragging myself through THE NEW ANNOTATED DRACULA.

You have been warned.

31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For the dead travel fast, October 9, 2008

By	E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"Dracula" was not the first vampire novel, nor was it Bram Stoker's first book.

But after years of research, Stoker managed to craft the ultimate vampire novel, which has spawned countless movies, spinoffs, and books that follow the blueprint of the Transylvanian count. Eerie, horrifying and genuinely mysterious, this is a book that was crying out for the kind of loving annotation that "The New Annotated Dracula" graces it with.

First we have an eloquent introduction by dark fantasy master Neil Gaiman, which serves as the gateway to a longer, densely informative foreword by Leslie S. Klinger. Klinger does some pretty extensive exploration of the origins of vampire literature, the impact of the Dracula character, and his presence in mass media ever since Stoker whipped together this book. It's a nice, meaty intro to the story:

And on to that story: Real estate agent Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania, to arrange a London house sale to Count Dracula. But as the days go by, Harker witnesses increasingly horrific events, leading him to believe that Dracula is not actually human. His fiancee Mina arrives in Transylvania, and finds that he has been feverish. Meanwhile the count has vanished -- along with countless boxes filled with dirt.

And soon afterwards, strange things happen: a ship piloted by a dead man crashes on the shore, after a mysterious thing killed the crew. A lunatic talks about "Him" coming. And Mina's pal Lucy dies of mysterious blood loss, only to come back as an undead seductress. Dracula has arrived in England -- then the center of the Western world -- and intends to make it his own...

The entire text is reworked into columns, with EXTENSIVE footnoting off to each side -- Klinger loads the text down with literary interpretations, historical explanations, places, attitudes of the time, clarification (the old woman who gave Harker the rosary, says Klinger, was probably a Hungarian immigrant) and even a bit of nitpicking. At times it gets a bit long-winded, but for sheer volume of explanatory information those footnotes can't be beat. It's a big thick chunk of a book though, so not advises for casual walking-around reading.

"Dracula" is the grandaddy of Lestat and other elegantly alluring bloodsuckers, but that isn't the sole reason why this novel is a classic. It's also incredibly atmospheric, and very well-written. Not only is it very freaky, in an ornate Victorian style, but it is also full of restrained, quiet horror and creepy eroticism. What's more, it's shaped the portrayal of vampires in movies and books, even to this day.

Despite already knowing what's going on for the first half of the book, it's actually kind of creepy to see these people whose lives are being disrupted by Dracula, but don't know about vampires. It's a bit tempting to yell "It's a vampire, you idiots!" every now and then, but you can't really blame them. Then the second half kicks in, with accented professor Van Helsing taking our heroes on a quest to save Mina from Dracula.

And along the way, while our heroes try to figure stuff out, Stoker spins up all these creepy hints of Dracula's arrival. Though he wrote in the late 19th-century manner, very verbose and a bit stuffy, his skill shines through. The book is crammed with intense, evocative language, with moments like Dracula creeping down a wall, or the dead captain found tied to the wheel. Once read, they stick in your mind throughout the book.

It's also a credit to Stoker that he keeps his characters from seeming like idiots or freaks, which they could have easily seemed like. Instead, he puts little moments of humanity in them, like Van Helsing admitting that his wife is in an asylum. Even the letters and diaries are written in different styles; for example, Seward's is restrained and analytical, while Mina's is exuberant and bright.

Even Dracula himself is an overpowering presence despite his small amount of actual screen time, and not just as a vampire -- Stoker presents him as passionate, intense, malignant, and probably the smartest person in the entire book. If Van Helsing hadn't thwarted him, he probably would have taken over the world -- not the Victorian audience's ideal ending.

Intelligent, frightening and very well-written, "Dracula" is the well-deserved godfather of all modern vampire books and movies -- and "The New Annotated Dracula" is a worthy exploration of that book.