Dracula
A solicitor's journal, a ship's log, a doctor's phonograph diary, newspaper cuttings and letters: Stoker tells the story entirely in documents, and the reader pieces the threat together before any of the characters can. The epistolary form is what makes the first half so tense.
Stoker was born in Dublin and worked there as a civil servant before moving to London. The novel's anxiety about travel, paperwork, modern medicine and unreliable records is very much a late-Victorian one, which is why it survives so many film versions.
Public-domain status
First published in 1897. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Bram Stoker died in 1912, so this work has been free to republish there since 1983.
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