Without fear of contradiction, the most gripping, exciting, amazing, spine-creeping THING ever to reach the screen! "DRACULA" has held two generations in fascination and terror! Its daring will ASTOUND you! Its SUSPENSE will chain you to your seat! You'll never forget DRACULA!

—from a one-sheet for Universal Pictures _Dracula _movie of 1931

It's October, Nathan's favorite month of the year! And as good as excuse as any to make his friends read one of the hallmarks of weird fiction, Bram Stoker's _Dracula. _

But first, Nathan and Brandon team up to offer some flesh-crawling context for this creepy-crawly chronicle of cruel carnality! Brandon tells us all about 19th century invasion literature, and Freudian theories of sex and the subconscious_ _(which are kinda unavoidable for this particular work). Nathan gives us a quick overview of vampire tales from Assyrian pottery shards to Bela Lugosi. Then Jake does some pastoral pondering about just why the heck people like vampires stories anyway.

Somehow our heroes get from there to Jake's theory that that hack Professor Tolkien stole the entire plot for _Lord of the Rings _from Bram Stoker. At least Bram didn't have any deus eagles machina. But that's getting away from our larger point, which is that you should listen to this episode of The Bookening.

Trivia: by complete happenstance, our heroes ended up recording this episode at around midnight in a building that was completely dark and deserted besides the room where they were recording. In Part 2 (coming next week) you'll hear something happen which may or may not sound all that creepy, but actually was pretty creepy in the moment.

Next month, we'll be reading a novel with (we're just guessing here) 100% less horrible demonic bloodsucking Transylvanian monsters: _Gilead _by Marilyn Robinson.

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