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. ( )

In honor of Halloween I wanted to finally take the time and read Dracula. It's one of the many books I've been meaning to read for a very long time, and this particular book has been in my library for about three years.

It was a very good book, but the footnotes were entirely too interesting, and this was a major distraction from the story. My eyes kept wondering down from the story to the bottom of the page to see what interesting tidbit I could learn next.

What I'll probably do is nab a paperback copy and read it properly with no distractions to the story. However, this book would be a must-have for any fan of Dracula and the vampire genre. The book has too many merits to count, and it really is a beautiful thing to possess. I loved it at first sight.

Beyond that, I did love the story. There were quite a few beautiful lines throughout the book (from Mina, mostly), and the ending was rather abrupt. I loved the ghoulish bits in the beginning with Dracula crawling down the castle like a lizard, the three mistresses finding delight with a baby in a bag, and a mother of a purloined child being ripped to shreds by summoned wolves at the castle's gate. It's obligatory to state that this novel, along with Frankenstein, is a basic staple for any fan of horror fiction. I'm happy to say that I've finally read it, and I'll most definitely read it again.

Bloody spectacular. ( )