Reviewed by: The Cambridge Companion to Dracula ed. by Roger Luckhurst Nicholas Daly (bio) The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, edited by Roger Luckhurst; pp. xvi + 219. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018, £54.99, £17.99 paper, $69.99, $22.99 paper. They stab him with their steely knives, but they just cannot kill that Transylvanian beast. Count Dracula fails utterly in his mission to conquer England in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel: forced to flee the country, he hightails it for Castle Dracula, but just as his castle lair is within reach, he is apprehended and reduced to vampire dust by the Kukri and bowie knives of Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris, and the magical power of the setting sun. If the Count is defeated, though, it seems fair to say that the book that bears his name now holds sway over not just England, but the Anglophone world more generally, and many other linguistic territories besides. Its offspring are legion, and not only are there a host of direct adaptations and more loosely-linked fictions, dramas, and arcade games, but there have also been innumerable Dracula-tinged spin-offs, including Halloween costumes, sugary snacks, and other merchandise; in my 1970s childhood, I licked a HB's mixed-fruit flavor "Dracula" ice lolly long before I ever encountered the book or even saw a film version. At the other end of the consumer market, the Count also now sleeps contentedly in the consecrated ground of literary respectability. This canonical status was not conferred overnight, and one could point to a few landmarks along the way: for instance, Leonard Wolf's 1975 Annotated Dracula, David Punter's discussion of the novel in The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (1980), Phyllis A. Roth's 1982 critical study of Bram Stoker, the Oxford World's Classics edition of 1983, and the 1996 Norton critical edition. And now we have The Cambridge Companion to Dracula, edited by Roger Luckhurst, who also edited the most recent Oxford World's Classics Dracula. Its appearance can hardly be a source of surprise; since its rediscovery, there has been a veritable frenzy of critical activity around Stoker's bloody tale. The initial 1980s Marxist (Franco Moretti) and [End Page 496] feminist (Phyllis A. Roth and Carol Senf, also a contributor to this collection) accounts were followed by a dizzying array of others, so much so that I have sometimes suggested to colleagues that the very last drop of interpretive blood has now been sucked from Stoker's text. This latest addition to the market, however, shows that there is plenty of life in the old monster yet, and Luckhurst has assembled a band of critics who seem more than able for this particular vampire hunt. New critical approaches are explored here, and some older ones receive a new lease on life. Importantly, I think, the contributors do not confine themselves to the novel itself, but also range freely around it. Recognizing that Stoker's late-Victorian gothic tale is assembled from the disjecta membra of earlier material, several essays here explore Dracula's literary and historical antecedents, while others deal with the many offspring of the novel: notwithstanding Van Helsing's pronouncement that vampires cast no shadows, this particular monster has cast a very long shadow indeed in popular culture. I cannot do full justice to the range of individual essays here, so I will pick out just a few highlights. In the section on Dracula's roots there are two strong pieces by Nick Groom and William Hughes. In his fascinating survey of earlier attitudes to vampires, Groom reveals the extent to which vampirism was often treated quite matter-of-factly by European writers in the eighteenth century. He also notes, however, that at least one contemporary British commentator, Caleb D'Anvers (pseudonym of Nicholas Amhurst), argued in 1732 that reports of blood-sucking monsters from continental countries should be read figuratively rather than literally, suggesting that such stories contained "a secret satire upon the Administration of those countries" (21). Long before Karl Marx, then, the rich representative possibilities of vampirism were put to use...