Prelude to a kiss

“DRACULA’S GUEST” is a rare example of Bram Stoker’s editorial restraint. Usually, his work was Grub Street quality: He dashed off 13 novels while managing London’s Lyceum Theatre company.

But Stoker had a different attitude when he wrote the novel he first called “The Un-Dead.” It was special. He lavished six years on getting the lore and suspense just right; when it was published in 1897, “Dracula” became the Victorian era’s version of “The Da Vinci Code.”

“Dracula’s Guest,” a short story released posthumously in 1914, turned out to be a false start, a dry run at the novel. A traveler gets caught in a violent rainstorm in a cemetery outside Munich on Walpurgisnacht (the night when demons are said to walk the Earth) and encounters a tomb containing a beautiful woman “with rounded cheeks and red lips” who’s staked to a slab for some reason (hmm) and a hellhound he barely escapes.

As an opening, the episode is far too explosive. “Dracula,” by contrast, begins slowly, disorienting readers with the natural strangeness of a faraway land. Jonathan Harker’s business trip to Transylvania has momentum, as if the count’s magnetism were steadily pulling him along -- a rhythm that “Dracula’s Guest” lacks.

Stoker put it aside; his widow, Florence, published it and several other stories two years after his death. Maybe she did it to keep his memory alive, although it’s more likely she just wanted the money: Unlike “The Da Vinci Code’s” Dan Brown, Stoker didn’t make a huge fortune with his bestseller.

That collection, “Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories” (Penguin: 408 pp., $15 paper), has been reissued and includes Stoker’s last novel, “The Lair of the White Worm,” a chilling idea that never quite comes off.

Naivete is the stock in trade of most of the collection’s main characters.

The narrator of “The Burial of the Rats” doesn’t realize that in exploring the dumps outside pre-Haussmann Paris, his glittery rings and modish clothes will turn the poor, starving souls living there into murderous hunters. Nor does the student of “The Judge’s House” realize that when a creepy old house has been left empty for many years, it’s best to stay away -- even if the house promises the perfect solitude to prepare for exams.

Stoker wasn’t the first writer to create the modern vampire tale (Sheridan Le Fanu and John Polidori preceded him), but he was the best. The stories in this collection are warm-up exercises; “Dracula” is the performance.

-- Nick Owchar