Dracula Daily is Tumblr’s hottest new book club

Anyone who’s anyone online has been keeping up with the daily journal entries of English solicitor Jonathan Harker — aka one of the main characters in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Tumblr has seen posts about classic novels take over. It may be odd to see large numbers of Tumblr readers declare the classic novel as their favorite book. However, Dracula Daily has a simple explanation.

How do you define Dracula Daily

Dracula Daily, a newsletter by Matt Kirkland is available. It delivers the 1897 classic novel. Dracula to your inbox — but with a twist. Bram Stoker’s book is written in epistolary format, via letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. The events of the story occur between May and November, and Kirkland “will post a newsletter each day that something happens to the characters, in the same timeline that it happens to them.”

Newsletter ActuallyKirkland relaunched it for this year’s launch after the first one was launched in 2011. It kicked off on May 3 — the day that solicitor Jonathan Harker begins his travel diary recounting his business trip to Transylvania — and will end on November 7. There will be no entries on some days, and others with multiple chapters. (Here’s a handy guide on when the emails will come, if you were curious).

It’s not a modern adaptation like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries or any adaptation featuring the Count. Castlevania. The newsletter is not an exclusive interpretation, as it moves day-by-day. It also jumps back and forth in time. The majority of the newsletter is, however, a good read. Dracula DailyIt is just the text DraculaIt’s delivered in small (ha!) chunks. It’s not the first run of this newsletter, but this time around, various online communities — particularly on Tumblr — have decided to bring Dracula Back to Life (ha ha).

XOXO Dracula

The internet is giving people a chance to taste the (ha ha ha ha) Dracula. It’s like a giant book club, except with a more generous time to finish your page count. Dracula Daily is a particularly popular Tumblr newsletter. Despite being launched on May 3rd, the newsletter beat pop culture heavyweights such as Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, Moon KnightAndThe Owl House (coming in second only to the Met Gala), according to Tumblr’s Fandometrics tracker.

User log on and find out that their friends were posting suddenly about it. Dracula. Some didn’t even know this was thanks to a newsletter, and simply assumed Tumblr users decided to latch onto an old book. Finding out about the newsletter, however, convinced people to sign up — which just resulted in more posts.

And when people on the internet are into something, memes are sure to follow — from fan art to comics and more. Many people have shared their delight at receiving an email from Jonathan Harker, their friend on the business trip to Dracula Daily.

It is funny to read a classic book like “The Great Gatsby”. DraculaBack in the Zeitgeist. Contrary to classics such as Pride and PrejudiceOrTo Whom is the Bell Tolls, you can be familiar with Dracula, the character, even without being familiar with the novel’s plot points. It is possible to find a similar equivalent in the novel’s plot points. Frankenstein, where people certainly know Frankenstein’s monster even if they haven’t read the book.)

With that thought in mind certain parts of Dracula’s novel are made more funny by the time. While we know Dracula in 2022, Jonathan Harker was unaware that a woman from the peasantry tried to give him an iron cross.

But it’s not all memes and tomfoolery. Many people use this opportunity to study the classic text in a more academic way, offering historical context and unpacking the parts that haven’t aged well.

Dracula Daily still has many months left, and only time will tell how the excitement will continue. If you’re interested in joining Tumblr’s hot new book club, you can still subscribe to the newsletter; the emails already sent out are available on the Substack page, if you want to catch up.