Every so often, other books would send me back to reread Dracula: Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape; Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula. Books which would, by reimagining the events or the results of the novel, cast enough light on it to make me want to revisit the castle, the madhouse, the graveyard for myself, to lose myself in the letters and the newspaper clippings, the diary entries, and to wonder once more about Dracula’s actions and his motives. To wonder about the things in the book that are, ultimately, unknowable. The characters do not know them, so neither do we.

Dracula the novel spawned Dracula the cultural meme—all the various Nosferati, the movie Draculas, Bela Lugosi and the fanged throngs who followed him. Over 160 films, according to Wikipedia, feature Dracula in a major role (“Second only to Sherlock Holmes”), while the number of novels that feature Dracula himself, or Dracula-inspired characters, is impossible to guess at. And then there are novels that lead into or lead out of Dracula. Even poor, mad, bug-devouring Renfield has two prose novels named after him, by two different authors, not to mention a graphic novel, all telling the story from his point of view.

In the twenty-first century any encounter with vampire literature or vampire tales is like hearing a million variations on a musical theme, and the theme began, not with Varney the Vampire, nor even with Carmilla, but with Bram Stoker and with Dracula.

Even so, I suspect that the reasons why Dracula lives on, why it succeeds as art, why it lends itself to annotation and to elaboration, is, paradoxically, because of its weaknesses as a novel.

Dracula is a Victorian high-tech thriller, at the cutting edge of science, filled with concepts like dictation to phonographic cylinders, blood transfusions, shorthand and trepanning. It features a cast of stout heroes and beautiful, doomed, women. And it is told entirely in letters, telegrams, press cuttings and the like. None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is actually going on. This means that Dracula is a book that forces the reader to fill in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know the significance of what they do tell.

So it’s up to the reader to decide what’s happening in Whitby; to connect Renfield’s rants and behavior in the asylum with the events that happen in the house next door; to decide what Dracula’s true motives are. It’s also up to the reader to decide whether Van Helsing knows anything about medicine, whether Dracula crumbles to dust at the end, or even, given the combination of kukri knife and bowie knife that, unconvincingly, finishes the vampire off, whether he simply transmutes into fog and vanishes . . .

The story is built up in broad strokes, allowing us to build up our picture of what’s happening. The story spiderwebs, and we begin to wonder what occurs in the interstices. Personally, I have my doubts about Quincey Morris’s motives. (The possibility that he is Dracula’s stooge—or even Dracula himself—cannot, I am convinced, entirely be discounted. I would write a novel to prove it, but that way lies madness.)