Do we like them?

Do we like Count Dracula?

A character from Dracula (1897)

Our score: 1 out of 10. No. He's charming over dinner, but he preys on people, controls them and treats everyone as a meal or a pawn. We'd keep the garlic handy.

Stoker tells the story through letters, diaries and newspaper clippings. It opens when young English lawyer Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to help a nobleman, Count Dracula, buy property in England. The Count is courteous, cultured and very strange. He is never seen in daylight, never eats with his guest, and keeps the castle doors closed.

Dracula is the archetypal vampire: a predator in aristocratic clothes. He is charming, patient and cunning, and he treats people as prey or tools. Readers often see him as an embodiment of Victorian fears about the foreigner and about desire slipping out of control. He gets almost no point of view of his own, which is why he stays so menacing.

Once he reaches England, he stalks Lucy Westenra and then Mina Harker. Professor Van Helsing and a circle of friends work out what he is and band together to stop him. He is clever and strong but bound by rules, and the group uses those rules against him. The hunt carries them back across Europe to his castle.

We score him 1 out of 10. He has style and intelligence, and he is the monster that every later vampire is measured against. But everything he does is predation and domination, and nothing in the book gives us a reason to back him.