You have no idea how warm and fuzzy it makes me feel to see vast swathes of the internet get passionate about Gothic literature! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me introduce you to the best thing that has happened online this year: Dracula Daily. Created by web designer Matt Kirkland, Dracula Daily is a brilliant new way to experience Bram Stoker’s vampire classic. The project takes advantage of Dracula’s epistolary format to turn the text of the novel into an email newsletter so that you can experience the story in real time. If you’re unfamiliar: Dracula is told entirely through a series of journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and ship’s logs dated from May 3 to November 7. Subscribers to Dracula Daily will get each entry delivered to their inboxes on the corresponding date. Though we’re already a few weeks into the story, it’s not too late to sign up! You can go back and read the entries you missed in the Dracula Daily archive. I started last week and just got caught up.
Kirkland created this project last year and ran through the whole novel in 2021, but its popularity really kicked off with this second round, which started earlier this month. The project has gone viral, spawning robust discussions of the text online, especially on Tumblr and Twitter. The accessible format of the Substack newsletter has inspired many people to read this classic for the first time, and its time-dependent nature means that everyone reading is quite literally on the same page, creating the sense that we’re all in a six-month-long book club.
The day-by-day element of this project helps readers to appreciate the small details of the story that might otherwise get missed, and the email format creates a sense of intimacy—as if the characters are writing directly to you. Readers on Tumblr, in particular, have adopted the habit of referring to the story’s protagonist as “my friend Jonathan,” acknowledging how personally invested they feel. One of my favorite things about this phenomenon, though, is that the online community around Dracula Daily excels at finding the humor in Dracula, which can often get overlooked when treating the text as a Serious Work of Literature. Over the past few weeks, readers have been making posts ribbing Jonathan Harker for his inability to handle paprika and laughing at the ridiculous image of the Count running around the castle trying to clean up and set the table when Jonathan isn’t looking in order to pretend that he has servants. The #DailyDracula tag on Twitter and Tumblr is full of memes and fanart, like you might expect to find in any other pop-culture fandom.
But just as exciting as this new fandom around Dracula is the new reading experience, itself. In fact, if you’ve read Dracula before you may begin to notice that the story is being told in a slightly different order! The Dracula Daily installments are purely chronological, whereas Stoker’s original text often doubles back on itself when picking up the story from another character’s perspective. Already, instead of getting Jonathan’s complete account of his initial visit to Transylvania before meeting any of our other narrators, some of Mina’s and Lucy’s early letters are mixed in with Jonathan’s journal entries. I’m looking forward to seeing what new insights this chronological reading may bring.
Are you doing Daily Dracula? If you haven’t signed up yet but you want to, you can do so here. If you have been following along, tell me in the comments below your favorite thing about the fandom or text that you’ve experienced so far!