The editor of The New Annotated Dracula by Bram Stoker acknowledges that the vampire story has been told hundreds of times in movies and on television. But Klinger is an advocate of that quaint activity known as reading.

"The book works far better than film because, like all books, it leaves much to the imagination," Klinger said in a recent e-mail interview.

"Even the physical act of sucking blood: How does it work, to bite with canines and then replace your lips over the wound? The canines are pretty far apart and wouldn't make for the two neat little holes always found on movie victims. It works so much better in the mind!

"The book builds slowly, which is great for the horror."

Klinger, who also edited the acclaimed The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes (2005), answered more questions.

Q: First, Sherlock Holmes; now, Dracula. Why does the Victorian world keep you so enthralled?

A: The Victorian age is fascinating to me for its combination of high ideals and horrendous problems -- poverty, limited civil rights, war, to name a few.

It's the birthplace of every great revolution of the 20th century, including civil rights, education reforms, computers, film and the democratization of Europe.

It seems so familiar to us but is really quite alien, and, of course, no one living remembers it anymore.

Q: What's the biggest myth we have about Dracula?

A: The biggest myth is that sunlight is anathema to vampires. Dracula is seen numerous times in the daylight, wholly unaffected, although his powers are supposed to wax and wane with the hour.

This myth was invented by (filmmaker F.W.) Murnau in Nosferatu and has been slavishly followed in many subsequent films. However, Anne Rice treated sunlight as more an inconvenience than a serious problem for her vampires.

Q: A BookPage review says: "Leslie S. Klinger's great virtue as an editor is his sublimely willful and scrupulous disregard for the boundary between historical fact and literary falsehood." How did you come to this scrupulous disregard?

A: Sherlockians have played a game for over a century, treating the . . . stories as true, historical documents and then researching the details to pierce the veil of false names and locations placed by Watson to protect the identities of the real participants.

I wanted to introduce this same approach to Dracula, and so I did, taking Stoker's introduction (in which he says that he was provided these papers by the Harker family and then edited them to change names) as truthful. (Solicitor Jonathan Harker sets in motion the tale with his journey to Count Dracula's castle.)

When one plays this game with the narrative, one must explain why there are so many inconsistencies between Jonathan Harker's description of Transylvania and the real geography, why Harker plagiarized so many Victorian travel books for descriptions, and most especially, why Dracula is "killed" by steel knives when Van Helsing asserts that only wooden stakes and decapitation can kill him.

The explanation is that Dracula was not killed, and that the narrative was produced by Stoker, under coercion by Dracula, as a "cover-up" for the real story (which the public already expected to be published and so could not be totally suppressed).

Dracula didn't live in Transylvania, but he wanted people to believe he did so they'd look in the wrong place for him; Dracula didn't die, but he wanted people to believe he had so they wouldn't look for him.

Q: After more than 100 years, why is Dracula still so appealing?

A: The character of the vampire strikes a chord with us: the loneliness of the outsider, the lure of immortality (and the price one may pay for it).

Vampire tales fascinate us -- witness the TV series True Blood and Stephenie Meyer's "Twilight" series of books as the two hottest current examples -- and Dracula is the fountainhead.

 Source: dispatch.com

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