I finished reading The Hungry Ocean, by Linda Greenlaw, last night, and have started reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, which is about Dracula. I'm only four or five chapters in, and already I'm dreaming about vampires.
(I never dream about romance novels, but I dream about vampires and mermaids, so maybe this whole romance novel idea is stupid and I should write the things in my dreams?)
Of course, the dream and book have reminded me about Fred Saberhagen's Dracula series (which includes An Old Friend of the Family and The Dracula Tapes, among others. These aren't great books, though they are entertaining mind-candy reads, but they do point out exactly why Dracula could NOT be dead at the end of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The first time I read his reasoning, I went back to the original text, of course, and checked the “death scene.”
If you read it carefully, it becomes obvious:
Saberhagen was right.