Dracula is a book that cries out for annotation. The world it describes is no longer our world. The geography it describes is often not of our world. It is a book that it’s good to traverse with someone informed and informative by your side.

Les Klinger is both of those things. I first met Les Klinger, who is, in his daily life, a lawyer, at the annual dinner of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of people who, like 58 percent of British teenagers, are pleased to believe that Sherlock Holmes was indeed a real person. Mr. Klinger is best known for his work annotating the Sherlock Holmes stories: his knowledge of Victoriana, of crime, of travel, is remarkable. His enthusiasm is delightful and contagious; his convictions and discoveries are, of course, uniquely his own.

One of the remarkable things about Mr. Klinger’s annotations is that they are illuminating whether or not you subscribe to the theories you will encounter here, of whether or not Dracula actually exists or existed, of whether Bram Stoker compiled and edited this book or whether he wrote it. Whatever you choose to believe, you will learn about Carpathian geography and Victorian medical theories. You will learn about the differences between the hardback and paperback editions of Dracula. You will be alerted to the wandering location of Shooter’s Hill.

One of the drawbacks to reading editions of Dracula is they come, like this one, with introductions, and the introductions tell you how Dracula should be read. They tell you what it is about. Or rather, what it is “about.” It is “about” Victorian sexuality. It is “about” Stoker’s presumed repressed homosexuality, or his relationship with Henry Irving, or his rivalry with Oscar Wilde for the hand of Florence Balcombe. Such introductions will comment ironically on Stoker’s writing against pornographic books when there is so much that is sexual seething in Dracula, barely under the surface, text, not subtext.

This introduction does not presume to tell you what Dracula is about. (It is about Dracula, of course, but we see so little of him, less than we would like. He does not wear out his welcome. It is not about Van Helsing and we would happily see so much less of him. It might be about lust or desire or fear or death. It might be about a lot of things.)

Instead of telling you what the book you are holding is about, this introduction merely cautions you: Beware. Dracula can be a flypaper-trap. First you read it, casually, and then, once you’ve put it away, you might find yourself, almost against your will, wondering about things in the crevices of the novel, things hinted at, things implied. And once you begin to wonder it is only a matter of time before you will find yourself waking in the moonlight unable to resist the urge to begin writing novels or stories about the minor characters and offstage events—or worse, like mad Renfield forever classifying and sorting his spiders and his flies, before, finally, consuming them, you might even find yourself annotating it . . .