Dracula

A ship runs aground at Whitby with every sailor dead and the captain lashed to the wheel, and nothing aboard but a foreign count in his crates of native earth. Bram Stoker builds his novel from the wreckage of ordinary documents: diaries, letters, telegrams, the wax cylinders of a phonograph, as though the modern world's whole arsenal of proof were needed to make anyone believe what has landed on English shores. It is not really about a monster in a cape. It is about the horror of a body that will not stay dead and will not stay itself, about blood passed mouth to mouth until the sweetest girl in the book, Lucy Westenra, rises from her own grave to feed on children and must be driven through the heart by the men who loved her. Stoker never once has to say the word erotic; every page insists on it anyway. Close the book and the count is still out there somewhere, patient, unkillable by daylight alone, waiting for an invitation.