It does happen that you find an e-mail in your inbox from someone you don't know at all, but who writes anyway because he got into trouble in a distant country because of dubious business and tells a confused story that you hardly ever hear can believe, and desperately and somewhat obtrusively asks for help.

Tobias Ruether

Editor in the feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

But this isn't spam: Since the beginning of May this year, the day has regularly started with a message from Jonathan Harker in the e-mail account.

Harker is a young lawyer who travels to the Carpathians to handle a real estate deal with a count for his London firm Hawkins, but is now, in a growing panic, recounting his experiences:

About his strange arrival, about disturbed fellow travelers praying for Harker, giving him their blessing and a crucifix for protection, about wolves and lights in the forest, about strange happenings in the count's castle, about the count himself, whose hands are freezing, who never eats when Jonathan is having dinner and who never sees Harker during the day.

Matching the panic, in spurts

Harker also tells of his growing claustrophobia, of realizing that he was less a guest than a prisoner in the earl's castle: "When I woke up this morning," he writes on May 31, in his last message as this article went to press, "I wanted to I take paper and envelopes out of my holdall and put them in my jacket to write in case of opportunity, but again a surprise, another shock!

Not a single scrap of paper was left, and with that all my notes and notes on railway connections and itineraries, my bank guarantee, in fact anything that might be of use to me once I was outside the castle walls, were gone.”

Nothing has happened since then.

And so you stare at your e-mail account in the morning and hope for a sign of life, you urgently want to know how things will continue with Jonathan and the Count, shocked again and carried away by Bram Stoker's vampire story "Dracula" - the one by the American designer and Internet artist Matt Kirkland was set up as a newsletter at Substack.

The original passages from the famous book that Stoker had published in May 1897 - and whose story the Irish author had condensed from the vampire legends that had been circulating in central and south-eastern Europe for centuries - are now arriving by e-mail in batches, in line with the panic .

Matt Kirkland, in turn, launched his "Dracula Daily" newsletter in May last year and then continued it until November 2021: analogous to the data in the book, which begins with Harker's journey to the vampire Dracula's castle in May, with the ship voyage of the Count goes on to London, reports there of terrible arguments between the vampire and his victims and subordinates and finally ends with the showdown back in Transylvania.

Where Dracula is beheaded by Harker's companions and stabbed in the heart, turning him to dust.

But because Kirkland's newsletter had already been a success for him in 2021, 1600 people had subscribed to it, and because Kirkland just felt like it and it was also May again, the designer "Dracula Daily" just put it on again.

Except this time, his project has gone viral on a whole new scale - and unleashed an avalanche of memes and comments on social media like Twitter and Tumblr.

Unforgettable scenes on Tumblr

And it gets bigger every day: Spotify playlists are created for the novel.

On Tumblr, users are drawing the unforgettable scenes between Harker and the Count: Jonathan cutting himself shaving and the vampire going for his throat, eyes sparkling "in a kind of devilish excitement."

How the Count intercepts the young lawyer's letters and burns them before Jonathan's eyes.

Famous passages from the book - "Again I saw the Count going out in his lizard way.

He moved down a good hundred feet, sideways to the left” – are underlaid on well-known memes by Bernie Sanders or collaged with drawings of Jonathan smoking on his castle room window.