Dracula's Guest
"Dracula's Guest" is a short horror story by the Irish author Bram Stoker. It was first published in 1914, some two years after Stoker's death, as part of the book Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, an anthology of Bram Stoker's short stories selected by his widow Florence.
It is widely believed that "Dracula's Guest" was originally intended to be the first chapter of Dracula and was removed from the novel because either Stoker or his publisher believed it to be superfluous to the novel. Analysis of the manuscript of Dracula indicates that a first chapter was removed from it. It is likely, however, that Stoker rewrote that excised first chapter before it was published as "Dracula's Guest".
The story's narrator and protagonist is an unnamed Englishman who is spending some time in Munich, Germany before travelling on to Transylvania as the guest of Count Dracula. Ignoring the warnings of a German coachman, the Englishman decides to go off on his own in the direction of a long-deserted village. The coachman says that the place is "unholy" and that it was abandoned because the dead did not stay truly dead there.
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About the Author
Abraham (Bram) Stoker was an Irish writer, best known for his Gothic classic Dracula, which continues to influence horror writers and fans more than 100 years after it was first published. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, in science, mathematics, oratory, history, and composition, Stoker' s writing was greatly influenced by his father' s interest in theatre and his mother' s gruesome stories about her childhood during the cholera epidemic in 1832. Although a published author of the novels Dracula, The Lady of the Shroud, and The Lair of the White Worm, and his work as part of the literary staff of The London Daily Telegraph, Stoker made his living as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker died in 1912, leaving behind one of the most memorable horror characters ever created.