Dracula, defanged

Although I wish the distinction belonged to something more esoteric, the scariest book I ever read was plain old "Dracula," by Bram Stoker. I can remember my 10-year-old self's horror at the most frightening (though not most loathsome) bit of all: the Count creeping down his castle wall, head first, as spotted by Jonathan Harker and recorded in his journal: "My very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings." So gratifyingly aghast was I at this horrid image that I would not have wanted to wonder, as Leslie S. Klinger does in "The New Annotated Dracula" (Norton, $39.95), why Dracula's cloak didn't "fall downward, towards the ground, covering him and impeding his vision."

Or, as he also wonders, why, instead of exiting in this terrible way, the Count didn't simply turn himself into a bat and fly off as, we learn, he is quite capable of doing. Such are the pettifogging questions that crop up to bother us in the annotated margins of this edition.

Klinger is best known as an indefatigable editor and annotator of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes series. He also belongs to that obsessive troupe of "Sherlockians" who embrace the "gentle fiction" that Holmes stories are records of the actual doings of a real person, and who find within them, in the inconsistencies and casual references, clues to an enlarged, more detailed, and often covert history of the man and his times. It is a wonderful conceit and dovetails nicely with the mood and manner of the Holmes stories. But Klinger has adopted the same approach for "Dracula," and I am afraid it won't do. Here the relentless noting of inconsistencies and supposed emendations to the record, and all the thumbing through street directories and Bradshaw's railway timetables, undermine Klinger's stated aim of restoring "a sense of wonder, excitement, and sheer fun to this great work."

Unlike the Holmes stories, which celebrate deductive reason and in which the smallest detail has the largest importance, "Dracula" is a novel of unease, innuendo, and sublime horror. As far as reason and detail are concerned, the story is a complete mess. To have someone blatting on in the margins about how this or that must have been stuck in later, or one thing doesn't jibe with some other thing, or that people are acting irrationally is more of a nuisance than an entertainment. In other words, it's a great distraction to the person who is trying to be scared out of her wits.

"On the lips were gouts of fresh blood. . . . It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay there like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion." I call that pretty good, but the cerebral Klinger balks: He wants to know exactly whose blood this is. He would also like to point out that this "description of postprandial Dracula is at odds with later observations of him after attacking Lucy or Mina" - heedless, as he is throughout, of revealing future events to those who don't know the story. Close analysis is the wrong joke for this book. If the novel were rational in the least degree, its heroes and heroines would be wearing crucifixes and strewing their persons with garlic and pieces of the Eucharist, day and night. But not this crowd, no sir, they ditz around with paperwork, call meetings, and then just bang off, leaving nice Mrs. Harker all alone without so much as a garlic crouton to protect herself.

It gives me no pleasure at all to criticize this edition, so let me say that it does include, among other diversions, countless absorbing photographs and illustrations of vampires and their exploits, an introduction by Neil Gaiman, a posthumously published short story by Bram Stoker, and sections on the post-Stoker adventures of Dracula in fiction, theater, and movies, as well as the appearance of the Count and his ilk in academic works.

While the greatness of "Dracula" lies in its insidious, horrifying creepiness, the story also has an inadvertent comic element. I, at least, find it funny that Dracula sneaks around the castle doing the housework: making Harker's bed, fixing meals, and clearing the table. And then I like it too that, in addition to sacred and vegetable prophylactics, our doughty band of vampire exterminators show their greatest pride in deploying secretarial weapons against the foul fiend: typewriter, carbon paper, dictating machine, telegraph, shorthand, and the chronological arrangement of records. The whole group is just mad about office skills, and ranges itself as a bustling, white-collar force against an engorged, gloating, and timeless evil.

There is no such silliness in John Wyndham's "The Chrysalids" (New York Review Books, paperback, $14). Wyndham is best known, if known at all, as the author of "The Day of the Triffids," the immensely chilling novel on which the famous film was based. In the present novel, first published in 1955, great swathes of the earth have been incinerated and irradiated by a nuclear war centuries earlier, and the life that has survived suffers in varying degrees from genetic mutation. The people of the little settlement of Waknuk in Labrador live according to fundamentalist beliefs combining religion and genetic purity: Any plant, animal, or human being showing mutant characteristics must be purged. Our hero, a boy called David, has discovered that his ability to communicate telepathically with a few similarly gifted children is a mutant trait and something to be hidden. It's a familiar setup for science fiction with a message, especially of the Cold War variety. But the novel goes well beyond edification. It is quite simply a page-turner, maintaining suspense to the very end and vividly conjuring the circumstances of a crippled and menacing world, and of the fear and sense of betrayal that pervade it. The ending, a salvation of an extremely dubious sort, leaves the reader pondering how truly ephemeral our version of civilization is - not of course that we haven't been pondering that nonstop for the last three weeks.

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.