A New Annotated Dracula

The New Annotated Dracula edited by Leslie S. Klinger with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. (Norton, 2008) Read his introduction at Times Online.

From the publisher: In his first work since his best-selling The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set), Leslie S. Klinger returns with this spectacular, lavishly illustrated homage to Bram Stoker's Dracula. With a daring conceit, Klinger accepts Stoker's contention that the Dracula tale is based on historical fact. Traveling through two hundred years of popular culture and myth as well as graveyards and the wilds of Transylvania, Klinger's notes illuminate every aspect of this haunting narrative (including a detailed examination of the original typescript of Dracula, with its shockingly different ending, previously unavailable to scholars). Klinger investigates the many subtexts of the original narrative—from masochistic, necrophilic, homoerotic, "dentophilic," and even heterosexual implications of the story to its political, economic, feminist, psychological, and historical threads. Employing the superb literary detective skills for which he has become famous, Klinger mines this 1897 classic for nuggets that will surprise even the most die-hard Dracula fans and introduce the vampire-prince to a new generation of readers.

Note: The Graveyard Book (I listened to on my long drive from Columbia, MD to Akron, Ohio), is a terrific yarn as narrated (and written) by Neil Gaiman. The story is about a boy named Nobody Owens, Bod for short, who as a toddler lost his parents and sister to a murderer called The Man Jack. The baby boy find safety in a nearby graveyard with its ghostly inhabitants. Mr and Mrs Owens who in life never had a child of their own adopt Bod as their son, and Silas, who is neither dead nor alive (ok, he's a vampire) agrees to act as Bod's guardian.