Jonathan Harker opens and closes the story of Dracula. He is the character who spends the most time with the dreaded Count in person. He is there for the torturous two-month stay in the gothic castle, he is there when the monster preys upon his beloved in the worst possible way, he is there at the very end of that vicious unlife. And yet, so many questions are left unanswered about him and what he endured between the lines.
What happened in those missing dates within Castle Dracula?
What happened as he ran through the Carpathians?
What was the source and result of that eerie change that came upon him on the 3rd of October?
It’s time we found out.
So goes the premise for my book-in-progress, Harker, featuring the perspective and perils as endured by Jonathan Harker throughout the novel Dracula. It’s not in first person though! While snippets of diary entries will appear like landmarks throughout the story, this will be a far meatier morsel as viewed through a third person POV to better fill in the wide gaps that Mr. Harker left between dates. It’s one of my bigger passion projects to date.
Almost 130 years have passed since Bram Stoker put his infamous bloodsucker on the bookshelf, and in all those years I believe Jonathan Harker, the co-protagonist alongside his wife Mina, has been one of the most universally bastardized, deflated, ignored, or outright erased characters in every single adaptation, spinoff, or lackluster academic piece.
Harker is the reaction to that. An act of pure indulgence, as so much Dracula media has proven to be, but with the barrier of confining myself to building off the text and subtext Bram Stoker actually left laying around in the book rather than resorting to the Bold and Subversive © take of, ‘All the humans were evil actually and Count Fuckula was so misunderstood and sexy about it and Mina totally did the sex with him because he’s a REAL MAN and all those murder victims had it coming actually; yes even the babies.’
This isn’t to say I won’t be getting inventive here and there—there is a lot of blank space to fill up, our guy was not thorough about the dates and Bramothy left so many plot holes regarding Jonathan’s exact status that I’m going to need a megaton of narrative spackle—but in all of it I mean to hold onto a core of respecting, celebrating, and terrorizing my beloved gothically menaced solicitor. I hope you enjoy the read as much as poor Jonathan suffers it.
BONUS! Teaser Art:
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