By day, Bram Stoker worked as a business manager for the Lyceum theatre in London, but by night? By night he wrote about the one and only Count Dracula.

Though his BA was in mathematics and he spent much of his time touring with the actor, Henry Irving, he honed his writing chops as a staff writer for The Daily Telegraph and other horror stories before ultimately penning his most famous Gothic tale. Most people attribute his inspiration for the text to Eastern European folklore, although he never traveled to Eastern Europe himself.

Dracula

You've seen every episode of Buffy; you've read the Twilight Series cover to cover; you can recite every line from Interview With a Vampire, and you're all about binge watching True Blood. But unless you've read this little gem, you're missing out on so much vampire goodness.

First you'll be surprised by just how much original vampire lore comes from Stoker's mythos. Second, you'll love the authentic creep-out factor he provides. But most importantly, Stoker's version carries some serious social undertones. Born in Ireland, Stoker was dealing with a lot of English-Irish tension, and he used Count Dracula's otherness as well as Eastern Europe's Catholic-ness to stand in for some of those issues.

Chew on This

While it's easy to see where Dracula fits into the Gothic tradition, you might be surprised that it also made way for what were thought of as "scientific romances" (think Romanticism, not amour). One of the earliest such texts was The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells. From a book about a non-dead man who can turn into a bat to a book about man-animals (manimals?)—go check it out.

At first, the parallels between these two texts may not be obvious, but Stoker and Wilde were buddies from Ireland dealing with a whole host of issues in England, and both texts deal with transformation, albeit with varying supernatural elements. Check out how The Picture of Dorian Gray's portrayal of otherness and transformation compares to Dracula's.