Dracula in my Bedroom

Dracula has always been my go-to monster. You can take Frankenstein’s monster, the Invisible Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and even the Mummy and Mr. Hyde—Dracula is the only one with the intellect, the swagger, and the conniving to get under my skin. Or into my bedroom.

When, as a boy, I told my grandmother I was intrigued by Dracula, she soon bought me a 60-cent Dell paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s famous novel. The image on its cover terrified me. I was nine years old, and I would live in fear that the count would jump off the book's cover and sink his fangs into me for years to come.

Never mind that Dracula is a fairly boring book. Never mind that as a youngster, I didn’t yet know about Freudian interpretation or see the story as an allegory of repression, predation, and desire. And never mind that I never actually read the damn thing; I only got so far as the narrator Jonathan Harker’s ill-fated trip to Transylvania to make a supremely misguided real estate transaction.

My timeworn copy of Dracula

What mattered was the horrific cover art of my paperback. Unlike my limpid Hardy Boys books or the anemic textbooks I kept on my built-in bookshelf, this edition of Dracula had a terrifying rendering of the titular count.

With flowing white hair, pointy ears, and pocked, pale blue skin that appeared to be cracking after centuries of being undead, a sinister, sidelong glance that would raise the dead, protruding fangs, blood-red lips, and a ruby medallion around his neck, this monster emanated menace. (Today, his thick mustache seems discordant with most imaginings of Dracula.) Unlike the suave Bela Lugosi, there was nothing smooth or subtle about this count. He filled me with dread.

The book was radioactive on my shelf. I would only pull it out to inspect it in broad daylight, only for moments at a time.

As a nine-year-old trying to sleep, I could not bear the fact that I was cohabiting with even a mere illustration of Dracula. Everyone knows that vampires must be invited in before they can do their blood-sucking routine, and I had foolishly invited Dracula into my childhood bedroom by way of my grandmother.

At right is a sampling of Dracula cover art from the late, great horror scholar David J. Skal’s biography of Dracula author Bram Stoker, Something in the Blood. Even today, for my money, the Dell paperback is by far the scariest.

It is, in fact, so scary that even now, decades after my grandmother first gave me the book, I hesitate to pull it off my office bookshelf for examination.

After over fifty years, I still have not driven a stake through that vampire’s heart.

Happy Halloween, everyone. Let's hope Dracula is the scariest thing we can imagine today and five days from now.