One of my favourites! I don't know how many times I've read this, but I've just read it again and so thought it was time to finally log it here. Despite it taking place some generations ago, the story still feels so very modern to me - I think because the structure is so interesting, so technologically up-to-date for its time, and because it's so inclusive of a number of different narrators and viewpoints. And, let's face it, this isn't the first vampire story but it's the one all others are judged by, and is the genesis of the popular perception of the vampire today. Dracula himself is so creepy, and so cold, and so absolutely devoid of the compassion that sets all the other characters apart. And yet Stoker is careful to make him an object of compassion as well - but not blind compassion, that which has led to so much vacuous over-excusing of monstrosity in many more contemporary vampire narratives. Dracula is a clear evil who needs to be destroyed, and yet even in the act of killing him the characters (and the readers) can feel a brief moment of pity for the man that existed before Dracula, and the release that real death has given him.

It's just an astonishingly well-written book on the existence and spread and defeat of evil. No wonder people keep coming back to it.