If I was Bram Stoker I'd remake the old Melanie hit - remember this one? 
 Look what they done to my song, ma 
 look what they done to my song 
 well it's the only thing that I could do half right 
 and it's turning out all wrong ma 
 look what they done to my song 
 Which the Count would have sung as 
 Uite ce au facut sa ma cantec, mama 
 Uite ce au facut cintecul meu e singurul 
 lucru care i s-ar putea face jumatate 
 dreptate si e intorcandu-se in toate regula mama 
 uite ce au facut sa ma cintec 
 Reviewing Dracula in this twilight age of loin-thrustingly pert young vampettes and vamparistas is like extolling the sexual allure of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow. 
 Dracula was the first "grown up" book I ever read. Hey, 12 year old PB, good choice! It made my pulse pound and my skin horripilated madly. But I do not think this would happen to a modern reader. Poor old recycled Dracula, rewritten, cartooned, parodied, Buffyfied, sliced, diced, crimped, carved, and ripped off in every one of a million ways, undead you were and undead you still are, if only as a Halloween costume and a footnote to an essay about Stephanie Meyer. 
 Given all of that, and given the high Victorian never use one word where a bucketful will do style of Mr Stoker, I still think it's worth five of my stars. It seethes with that wonderful sexual hysteria the Victorians loved writing about, from Wuthering Heights to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. They couldn't mention anything directly so they did their best with linguistic nodding and winking, and much mention of purity, and chasteness and its opposite unchasteness. Bosoms were okay, anything beneath waist level was absolutely not, until you got to shapely ankles and well-turned feet. So you can see they were gagging for it, and the writers were ferociously finding metaphors for writing about sex; and Bram Stoker found vampires. The strong sick pall of sexual dread which suffuses Dracula like a London pea-souper is seduction. This is what Stoker wants to write about - seduction and sexual enslavement, or, why do good girls fall for such very bad men? The Count is the embodiment of all seducers. He comes around at night and he gets into your fiance's bedchamber, so naturally you have to drive a big phallus right through his heart. I get that. Bram Stoker is practically frothing about all of this. 
 Bram Stoker invents most of the trappings of vampires right here and throws in a handful of the most outrageous scenes (three beautiful young female vampires in the dead of night overheard squabbling about who should get the baby they have got in the bag they're holding up; three men all giving one woman a blood transfusion using only a rubber hose; the Count scrabbling up a castle wall as fast as a man could run, all great stuff). 
 I say read Bram Stoker, read Let the Right One In, and step delicately around Twilight.