Bram Stoker’s Dracula audiobook review – cinematic horror with an A-list cast

Do we really need another retelling of Bram Stoker’s fabled horror novel, which has already yielded multiple films, plays and radio dramas? Perhaps not, but this new audio version of Dracula, directed by Mary Lambert and adapted by Robyn Aherne, justifies its existence with an unusually star-studded cast, a streamlined story and an immersive and frequently nightmarish sound palette.

Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey is smooth and charismatic as the eponymous count who invites a young solicitor, Jonathan Harker (Louis Partridge), to his castle in Transylvania to assist him with the sale of a property. There, Harker becomes increasingly uneasy as he glimpses the count’s diabolical powers and realises that he is, in fact, a prisoner.

Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on in Whitby, England, where Jonathan’s fiancee Mina (Ella Purnell) is visiting her friend Lucy (Aimee Lou Wood). Shortly after a Russian ship is found wrecked on the shore with its captain murdered and its crew nowhere to be seen, Lucy has an unusual encounter in a graveyard that leaves her with puncture wounds on her throat and prone to night terrors. David Jonsson plays the doctor who tends to Lucy, while Maggie Gyllenhaal is brilliantly cast as garlic-wielding vampire hunter Van Helsing.

This adaptation comes with a haunting score by Ilan Eshkeri and cinematic sound that plunges the listener into Dracula’s castle with its disembodied voices and echoing corridors (this is a series best heard via headphones). It doesn’t shrink from the shock and gore, either, even though the blood-sucking scenes are done sparingly and without a hint of camp.

Available via Audible Originals, 5hr 57min

Further listening

A Rebel and a Traitor
Rory Carroll, HarperCollins, 11hr 24min
The Killing Thatcher author trawls through letters, police reports and declassified government documents to tell the story of Sir Roger Casement, the British diplomat who became an Irish nationalist and fierce critic of British imperialism. Read by Stephen Hogan.

A Truce That Is Not Peace
Miriam Toews, Fourth Estate, 3hr 45min
The celebrated Canadian writer narrates her deliberately fragmented memoir in which she recalls the deaths of her father and sister from suicide and her repressive Mennonite upbringing.