'Dracula, The Original 1897 Text, Halloween Edition' Restores Bram Stoker's Novel of 118 Documents, Told by Everyone Except the Count

NEW YORK, Oct. 29, 2026, The book behind a century of costumes has been published for the Halloween season in the form Bram Stoker actually published in 1897. Dracula, The Original 1897 Text, Halloween Edition (Companion Classics) presents the complete original text, all twenty-seven chapters, cross-checked against the 1897 first edition, with original companion material by editor Horace Harriott Jr., including an introduction, a who's-who, five explainers, a short life of Stoker, and an appendix mapping every document in the novel.

Dracula is a novel made entirely of paper: 118 documents, shorthand journals, a diary spoken into a phonograph, letters, telegrams, a ship's log, newspaper cuttings, and a Count who never writes a line of it himself. The edition is built on the record of those documents: who writes, when, and what no single character ever knows. The introduction tells the story of Stoker's seven years of notes, the Whitby summer, and the name he found in a library book, with the honest scholarly caution that the documented link to Vlad the Impaler is the name itself, and the fuller identification is later scholarship, not Stoker's notes.

The five explainers cover how to read an epistolary novel; the vampires before Dracula, Polidori, Varney, and Le Fanu's Carmilla; the real geography of Transylvania and Whitby; the technology of 1897; and the New Woman and Mina's typewriter. An honest note addresses the period text, and discussion questions are provided for every chapter plus a whole-book set.

Book Club Kit

Alongside the book, the Dracula, Halloween Edition Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF, arranged as a three-meeting Halloween schedule ending on Halloween night, with the complete Chapter & Documents Map and a "Spot the Document" exercise. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/b/Va86x

Dracula, The Original 1897 Text, Halloween Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/U3You, print editions follow on Amazon. The novel's text is public domain (Stoker died in 1912); all companion material is original to this edition. This is an independent edition.

About the editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the book

Dracula, The Original 1897 Text, Halloween Edition, Bram Stoker (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Novel text: the 1897 text, first published by Archibald Constable, Westminster, May 26, 1897; 160,756 words; 27 chapters; 118 documents.