The Batlord

Dracula was an old world monster in a place where peasants were still peasants, lords were still lords, and science was something that happened to other people. It's kind of natural that anyone would at least want to explore some brave new world with electricity and steam engines. If it seems like a weak premise then it's probably cause any ol' person deciding to leave their hometown is not interesting, but when it's a being who can only sleep in a coffin filled with soil from their native land then it becomes something of an interesting logistics problem (and Stoker loved him some tedious logistics).

But the old world vs. new world theme was pretty evident in the book (even aside from the racist, anti-Eastern European aspect). The people fighting Dracula were involved in, at the time, new technology and practices such as psychology, blood transfusions, that recording thing they used for a diary in the last half of the book. All going up against Satan and peasant superstitions basically.

I'm not going to pretend like Dracula was a brilliantly written book or anything, but the premise of a vampire wanting to leave his backwoods obscurity for a land far advanced is perfectly reasonable (real people do it all the time), and even interesting, as it paints him as something other than just a blood fiend. Now he's curious. It doesn't have to be about some plot using phlebotinum to turn all the world into daywalkers to be good.

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