Last year I decided that it was about time I read Dracula. I had seen Leslie Klinger's The New Annotated Dracula and knew this was the version that I had to own. It was not before long that I realized this was the wrong version for my first time Dracula read. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE all of the information but the annotations were so lengthy and drew me in (cue: me flipping through the pages to read a note that was referenced 3 chapters earlier) it was going to take me 3 times as long to get through the book. I finally had to ignore most of the notes, knowing that I would be able to read them later.

My favorite part of the book would have to be the beginning, when Jonathan is at Dracula's castle. The descriptions are great, with just enough creepiness to get my heart pumping. I am ashamed to say that I was totally in the dark about how the book ended. I did not know what happened to Dracula, I actually thought the exact opposite happened. It was a surprising revelation as well as a fun one. It is nice (and a bit pathetic) to be surprised by the end of a classic.

I found it interesting that Dracula's connection with Mina reminded me of Voldemort and Harry Potter. The marks on the forehead and the mental connections that they had were similar enough that I began to wonder if J.K. Rowling had any inspiration from Dracula while writing HP.

I am so glad I can finally say that I have read Dracula. It was an interesting story that I waited way too long to finally read. Now that I have finished, I am excited the next Halloween I will dive in again. I wonder what kind of details I missed the first time around. ( )

Great book with high recommendation - clarifies a lot. The author takes it to original manuscripts of the book (ref: http://www.webliterature.net/literatu...) and produces a stunning work. ( )

I would suspect that, by now, anyone who does not know the plot of Dracula has been living under a rock for more than a century. So we won't talk about the story. Instead, we'll talk about the book. The Annotated Dracula is a fabulous edition of Stoker's novel, with commentary by Harlan Ellison, Robert Bloch and many more. Includes the "lost" first chapter, "Dracula's Guest"; a selected bibliography and filmography. Illustrated. Introductory essay by Leonard Wolf. A must have. ( )

I was a bit disappointed to realize that Dracula does not stand up very well to re-reading, at least in my opinion -- a lot of plot elements that seem to make sense the first time around show themselves to be riddled with holes with re-reading. I still love Mina, though.

What really made this a five-star read for me were the marvelously detailed and witty annotations from Leslie Klinger. As with his masterful work on The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Klinger works from the tongue-in-cheek assumption that Dracula is a fictionalized record of true events. This prompts cattiness over the confusion of dating the events of the book, since the moon is full every time it's mentioned, but also offers loopholes for some of the more egregious errors in the novel: clearly, the reason Van Helsing is a wildly incompetent medical doctor is that the "real" Van Helsing was not a medical doctor at all, and this vocation has been added in order to disguise the identity of the real Van Helsing! In addition to these amusements, the notes are riddled with information about Transylvanian geography and culture, historical and modern views on vampirism, and all kinds of useless trivia that is just ridiculously fun for a nerd like me. ( )

Dracula's not a new story for me - or for nearly anyone - but The New Annotated Dracula was a refreshing look at this old story. Leslie Klinger's slight "editorial conceit" is that Dracula is based on actual events described by the Harkers, and that the extant source material shows the evolution of the story as Stoker tries to disguise the people and places involved without destroying the core of the story. He then uses the source material (a set of research notes and an early manuscript showing hand written corrections) and clues from the manuscript to work out timelines and settings for the "real" story, which are described in a great (in number and in interest) set of notes to the text. Add an introduction by Neil Gaiman and a set of appendices discussing the later history in book and film of the Dracula story and a brief introduction to literary analysis of the story, and we get a really nice reference volume.

Klinger's work points out several things that I'd never noticed in previous readings. First and foremost, Van Helsing isn't the know-it-all expert on vampires I expected him to be. We have this picture of him as a wise old vampire hunter, but in reality, Stoker paints him as a very intelligent scientist confronted by a new field with very practical and immediate consequences. Van Helsing needs to go off and do research, he makes mistakes, he misinterprets vampire behavior and constraints. So in reading the story this time, he became a more real character for me. The other eye-opening came with the alternate interpretation of Quincey Morris' behavior, especially as it relates to Dracula's death. It's possible to infer that in fact, Dracula escaped in the end, an idea that really intrigued me. Neither of these ideas are new, but Klinger's work really laid out the cases nicely.

While the notes were great, and Klinger did a great job introducing Stoker's life and the immediate history of the book, I thought the appendices were a bit weak. There are definitely other places to go for a better recounting of post-Stoker Dracula works. There's a lot of analysis of the story out there, but Klinger sticks with the standby interpretation of vampirism as a substitute for sex. Ok, that's fine, but his analysis is a bit shallow, and a bit tired.

If you haven't read Dracula yet, I suspect the format of the book and all the notes will be distracting. If you've read and enjoyed the story, this edition will probably add to the richness of the text and you may want to consider it for your next reread. ( )