Last May I started reading Dracula, and unfortunately for everyone around me, I have been absolutely unbearable about it ever since. 

Letting an old-timey vampire take up a solid chunk of the real estate in my brain for a year was definitely not on my 2023 bingo card, but when you find a horror novel filled with everything a reader could ask for – a vampire, a girlboss, a cowboy, a guy who eats flies, a 4-way love triangle (a love square?), and so much more wholesome friendship than you ever would have expected – it’s hard to forget about. 

Dracula Daily is a Substack created by Matt Kirkland which emails you snippets of Dracula (almost) every day over a period of about six months. As Dracula is written in the form of diary entries between the different characters, each diary entry is sent to you on the date that it occurs in the book, meaning that you get to read the novel as it happens in ‘real time’ starting from May 3. 

I used to have a bad reading habit: As soon as I picked up a book and saw it was set way back in the past, I’d immediately put it down. In my head, any book that could be described as ‘historical’ would require an awful lot of effort to translate it from Ye Olde English, and probably involved people eating gruel and women not being allowed to leave the house. So a book like Dracula, which was written by Bram Stoker in the lord’s year 1897, had zero chance of making it on my ‘to-read’ list. Until it did. 

I must admit that I discovered Dracula Daily through browsing Tumblr (yes that’s right, I am a self-respecting adult who still uses Tumblr in 2023). From the sheer volume of people posting about it and sharing their inside jokes, I felt like I had to sign up myself. Imagine getting FOMO from strangers on the internet reading a gothic novel in their emails. 

It then became clear that Dracula was incredibly addictive. I felt increasingly tense after each cliffhanger and tried my best to avoid spoilers, as if the book hadn’t been available to read for the past 125 years. 

In the end I couldn’t wait any longer and bought the book off Facebook marketplace (the real birthplace of horror stories), and have been rattling on about how it is one of the greatest things I have read ever since. So how did Dracula draw so many people in so quickly? 

That would be because of the immediate relationship you form with the main character, Jonathan, or as the internet refers to him, ‘my good friend Jonathan Harker’ (I can’t believe the face of online parasocial relationships is a fictional lawyer from 1897.) This phrase stems from the fact that it kind of felt like Jonathan was emailing us personally, every few days, as if we were the ones meant to receive his letters.

It also made the time between entries feel more real: waiting three days to hear from Jonathan while he was trapped in a castle with a bloodthirsty villain made the character’s fear so much more palpable than it would have been if you could have just flicked to the next chapter. 

This is a great way of showing how the platform can truly affect the interpretation of a piece of work: the choice to send out Dracula through emails made it feel personal, quick to read, and completely approachable to the average person. 

The email format also made it easier to access. Unfortunately, due to the addictive qualities of TikTok and other social media, putting down your phone and picking up a book requires a certain strength to push through our collective brain rot that many of us don’t possess on a daily basis. 

However, instead of amping yourself up to read a 19th century novel, you only had to psych yourself up to read a paragraph in an email, which is far less daunting. Why not take a quick look when you are lying in bed? Or on the bus? Or on your lunch break? The accessibility of the text makes it more achievable to actually make time to read. 

Aside from the email format, there are several other reasons why the themes of Dracula may be appealing to people at this moment in time. After experiencing a large period of uncertainty and terror during the pandemic, tales of trying to escape a terrifying yet somehow inevitable bodily change seems awfully on the nose. 

Many have also been quick to see metaphors of queerness rife throughout the text, such as vampirism being spread through the exchange of bodily fluids acting as an allegory for HIV. Historically, queerness has had to find ‘discrete’ ways of being represented in literature, and often found refuge in horror or science fiction genres. We see this in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which explores “the inability to ignore or destroy one's sexuality”, as well as in The Matrix acting as an allegory for transness. 

There are many theories of how Bram Stoker may have written Dracula to express his “fear and anxiety as a closeted homosexual man during Oscar Wilde’s trial”. Applying these concepts to the text from a different time period creates more depth and analyses that many people in 2023 can easily identify and relate to. 

Paired with this, The Cullen Effect has done wonders for the vampires’ marketing team. Modern vampires are now so well-loved in pop culture that it is easy to forget their origins of being horrific and bloodthirsty monsters - a phenomenon that benefits the novel by lending Dracula the element of surprise when the vampires are actually scary. 

Contrasting Twilight, where the main vampire loves piano, baseball, and tries really hard not to bite, Dracula offers readers a chance to see what it was like before vampires in the media were sanitised “vegetarians” with puppy dog eyes. 

Ultimately, the crux of Dracula Daily’s success lies in the sheer volume of people reading and discussing it simultaneously. 

After reading a new diary entry, I would immediately rush to Tumblr just like one would rush to Twitter after a particularly dramatic episode of Love Island. People would post their live commentaries of each email, sharing a combination of memes and insightful analyses with historical context that helped to educate one another on the significance of the novel. 

In this sense, Tumblr acted as an ‘online book club’, allowing the text to be discussed across wider audiences than ever before. 

Dracula Daily’s way of making literature feel approachable and fun is invaluable to readers, and it is reassuring to know that not all modern uses of technology need to be scary, futuristic and AI-driven in order to serve people and improve their lives. 

The Substack has not only managed to introduce a brand new generation to the works of Bram Stoker, but has set a new trend altogether of using email as a vehicle for literary classics: you can now read Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and Pride and Prejudice in the same digital format. 

If you’ve been wanting to read classic novels like this but didn't know where to start, go forth and join the party online: you have until May 3 to sign up to Dracula Daily. I’m sure our good friend Jonathan Harker can’t wait to meet you.