How Bram Stoker’s Dracula Became ‘Dracula Daily,’ and an Internet Sensation

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/05/books/bram-stokers-dracula-daily.html

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Confined by the pandemic to his home in Lawrence, Kan., in the summer of 2020, Matt Kirkland pulled an old paperback of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” from his bookshelf and decided to reread it.

“Being trapped in a castle, trying to get out, felt like it had a lot of parallels there,” he said.

He shared the epistolary novel with his 11-year-old daughter. As he read, Kirkland noticed the letters from the novel’s protagonist, Jonathan Harker, were also dated in the summer. He started to synchronize the readings to the dates on the letters, creating a sense that the events in the book were unfolding in real time, and heightening the drama for his daughter, who asked him daily for updates.

By the end of the year — with a lot of pandemic downtime in his hands — he’d decided to expand on the idea, creating “Dracula Daily,” a newsletter that sends a missive from Harker to subscribers’ inboxes following the book’s chronology. Kirkland queued up the posts and began sending them to subscribers in May 2021.

Count Dracula — a recluse plagued by yearning, a macabre flair for theatrics and existential loneliness — turned out to be an unlikely patron saint for the uncertain times, Kirkland said. The newsletter became a success and internet sensation: Subscribers found that serialization made the 125-year-old novel more accessible and created a community of readers at a time when many were looking for connection.

“It’s allowed us to have this relationship with these people,” said Italia Gorski, a subscriber, of the characters in the book. “This is forcing us to go slowly, get real-life updates, causing the story to be very real.”

The literary interpretations of Dracula among readers range from rhetorical analysis to memes of the vampire, said Gorski. For her, the kind of engagement possible on the internet — memes and one-liners about crucifixes — can ignite as much critical thought about a novel as an annotation.

“It’s interesting to see how much people are relating to the characters in the novel in a situation and a society that is very different than our own,” she said.

That first summer, “Daily Dracula” had 165,600 subscribers reading along. By its second run, which began in 2022, the newsletter had racked up 230,000 subscribers and legions of dedicated fans on Twitter, Tumblr, and TikTok. Kirkland plans to continue into 2023, starting on May 3 and running until Nov. 6, the date of the last letter, and is also thinking of serializing other classic novels.

Readers come from a wide range of backgrounds, including those who were new to the novel and well-versed Victorians and other academics who offered insights into the Gothic age, said Lauren VanDenBerg, another reader. For many, she said, the diversity of perspectives and the chance to engage in group discussion were part of the appeal.

“People are sharing annotations or lessons they have learned in class. Some people are really into maritime law from the Victorian era,” she said, adding that the scholarly analysis alongside the lighthearted humor creates an inviting atmosphere for young readers.

“Somebody comes along and explains or points out something that you missed,” she said. “It’s much easier to take on as a project and digest what’s actually happening. A big inside joke is always fun.”

But for VanDenBerg, the real draw was the book’s camp, which she said was a perfect fit for Tumblr. She signed up, she said, because she wanted to see the reaction to the unexpected cowboy who appears in the novel.

Count Dracula also has an unexpectedly relatable side, she said.

“You have Dracula running around pretending he’s his own staff in this castle,” she said. “You find out it’s just him doing it. All of us are trying to be cooler than we are sometimes. Everyone is like, ‘yeah, I’ve had moments like that.’”

Ashley Barner, a subscriber and a fantasy writer, said that the collective reading experience was like being part of an online book club that never sleeps. “There’s this communal aspect to it,” she said. “It’s like watching a TV show together.”

Leah Davydov, one of the scholarly voices of in the “Dracula Daily” community, credits her academic career to her lifelong Dracula obsession. While pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature at Case Western Reserve University, Davydov was introduced to the newsletter by one of her students. She recognized the book’s appeal to a broad audience, she said.

“It’s about Dracula having intense loneliness and a desire to rejoin humanity,” she said. “And Jonathan is getting increasingly isolated and paranoid. I think this is true of many Gothic works of literature in terms of confinement and freedom. So, I think it speaks to a post-Covid audience in some ways.”

Davydov points out that the serialized reading schedule of “Dracula Daily” mirrors the 19th-century practice of publishing novels in installments. “It’s just a marvelous little quirk of history that we’ve come back to this place,” she said.

Receiving an email with a couple of paragraphs a day also builds suspense and encourages a close read of the text, she said. “It takes away the threat of having to deal with a bunch of sometimes dense, sometimes obscure Victorian prose.”

For some readers, part of the appeal of “Dracula” is what they see as its homoerotic angst. “It’s just a very queer novel,” Gorski said. “Dracula is portrayed as a seducer in the novel with the women and Jonathan. There’s also the friendship between Mina and Lucy.” On Tumblr, she said, the queer story lines in the novel spark discussion and fan fiction.

With the success of “Dracula Daily,” other Substacks and newsletters have begun serializing classic literature, said Kirkland.

“There’s been this whole ecosystem of other people doing it with other public domain works,” he said, pointing to digital serialization of works including “Moby-Dick,” “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” and “The Divine Comedy.”

Kirkland suggested that the appeal of the book also stems in part from our fascination with vampires and their ever-shifting presentation in Western art and culture. He grew up watching the Count, on “Sesame Street,” he said; Gen Z readers have revived the “Twilight” novels. In the television show “What We Do in The Shadows,” vampires stumble through the modern world with high jinks and queer debauchery seemingly plucked straight from Stoker’s novel.

“People are into the deconstruction of vampires now,” Davydov said. “‘What We Do in the Shadows’ is a brilliant lampooning of vampiric tropes.”

With “Dracula Daily,” vampire fans can return to the original source.