A Dowry of Blood

Dracula is an 1897 epistolary novel by Irish writer Bram Stoker. It is widely considered to be the most famous and influential vampire story in the world. In Stoker’s novel, a young solicitor named Jonathan Harker travels from England to Transylvania to meet with his client, Count Dracula, about a real estate deal. Dracula imprisons Harker in his castle. During his imprisonment, Harker encounters three beautiful, unnamed vampire women who try to drink his blood; Dracula stops them at the last minute. Harker escapes, and both he and Dracula journey separately back to England. There, Harker, his wife, Mina, and several of their friends encounter Dracula, who attempts to turn both Mina and her friend, Lucy, into vampires. Harker and his associates kill Lucy after she becomes a vampire. They chase Dracula back to Romania, where they successfully kill the vampire. The year is not specified, but the novel is likely set in the 1890s.

Stoker’s version of vampirism is different from many modern portrayals. Dracula implies that it takes a long time to turn someone into a vampire. The process remains mysterious, but it appears to involve a vampire drinking a human being’s blood a little at a time over the course of days or weeks, at the end of which the victim drinks some of the vampire’s blood, dies, and returns as an undead vampire. The process is, up to a point, reversible; Mina has much of her blood drained and also drinks some of Dracula’s blood, but she ultimately recovers from the experience and remains alive and human. In most contemporary stories, including A Dowry of Blood, a vampire can turn a human by biting them, drinking almost all their blood, and then allowing the human to drink vampire blood, with the entire transformation taking mere minutes or hours. 

Dracula has many supernatural powers in the original novel. He can turn into mist, and he can control rats. He can also control people’s minds and crawl up walls vertically. He is exceptionally strong. In A Dowry of Blood, vampires are very strong, but no other powers are mentioned. Stoker’s Dracula is stronger at night, and his powers are severely curtailed in daylight hours. His powers are at their height at dawn and dusk. Most later vampire stories suggest that vampires will perish if exposed to the sun’s rays. A Dowry of Blood is unclear on this issue: Constanta is turned during the day, and neither she nor Dracula appears to suffer any ill effects from the sunlight at that time. Once she becomes a vampire,  Constanta describes sleeping during the day and waking at night, and she suggests that sunlight can cause her pain and is dangerous, though the details of this danger are never elaborated upon. The method for killing a vampire remains consistent in Dracula and A Dowry of Blood: The killer must put a stake through the vampire’s heart and then decapitate them.