'Dracula Daily' Is the One Substack You Need a Subscription To

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This week, Esquire is celebrating Halloween season with an ode to our favorite nocturnal creature: the humble vampire. Whether you want to relish in the beauty of What We Do in the Shadows's Nandor, relive the indelible camp of Twilight, or simply catch up on the best vampire novels and films, we’re here to provide a smattering of vampire-themed stories, made just for you. So grab your garlic and a stake, dear reader—we’re taking a trip to the underworld.

Just before Matt Kirkland created Dracula Daily—a serialized version of Bram Stoker's legendary vampire novel, delivered in chronological order—he ran the idea by a few people. Some were into the concept. Others? Not so much. “That sounds fun,” he recalls them saying, mimicking their syrupy assurance. “But there’s no way I’m doing it.” To be fair, Kirkland asked if they would sign up for a newsletter that sends an email each day something occurs in Dracula. Since Dracula occurs between May 3 and November 7, that’s over 100 dispatches. If I didn’t know any better, I might've declined the invitation myself.

That was three years ago. Thanks to Kirkland's determination (and disregard for naysayers!), Dracula Daily is a thriving newsletter with over 240,000 subscribers. Dracula Daily has been so successful, in fact, that Kirkland recently spun off the concept into a book. It's formatted just like the newsletter, with all of Dracula spliced up into daily entries. The only difference is that the book includes inside jokes and artwork, which Kirkland sourced from his community of readers. “The goal of the book is to be a keepsake for the Internet community and newsletter,” Kirkland tells me over Zoom. “That way, you can experience it without signing up for 110 individual emails.”

The idea for Dracula Daily came to Kirkland when he reread the novel in 2020. His daughter, Judy—who was just 10 years old at the time—took an interest in the plot and routinely asked for updates. "That summer, she was saying, ‘What’s happening in Dracula?’ That’s what started the process of delivering it [bit by bit]," Kirkland says. "I was like, ‘Jonathan is trying to figure out how to leave the castle. Meanwhile, Mina and Lucy don’t know about it yet." As this ritual continued, Kirkland wondered what it might be like if everyone took Judy’s reading approach. "Once the idea was planted, I thought, I’m gonna do it and see if anyone else wants to read it this way too."

Spoiler alert: they do. As it turns out, arranging Dracula in chronological order—with all of its letter, diary entries, and newspaper clippings—makes the story much easier to digest. Over the past three years, Dracula Daily has birthed a fandom of Dracula lovers, new and old, who are eager to sink their teeth into the spellbinding tale. Below, Kirkland opens up about his spooky Substack empire, his favorite Dracula characters, and the legacy of Stoker's beloved tale.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

ESQUIRE: Congratulations on another successful year of Dracula Daily. I have to ask: Is it a one-man show?

MATT KIRKLAND: It's a one-man show, but actually, it doesn't take much work. I set the whole thing up in a weekend. It took some digging to go through the text and arrange it by date, but mostly it’s just a lot of reading. Once I got the whole book organized chronologically, then I just had to copy and paste it into emails and schedule them to go out. I probably spent as much time trying to think of something funny to be in the subject line as I did arranging the emails themselves.

Tell me about the reception. Have you met any Dracula superfans?

It's amazing. There’s so many people [who subscribed to Dracula Daily]. It still blows my mind. More people are reading it this year than last year. I’ve met people who are experts on the time period and this type of literature. I’ve met superfans who are into all things vampire or Dracula. I’ve been doing this tour for the last couple of weeks, up and down the East and West Coast, and at every event, there are people in costumes and fangs. It’s delightful.

Why do you think Dracula is still so popular?

Well, it's the classic vampire story. It’s where we get all these tropes about what vampires can do—and Count Dracula, himself, as a character. It's a fun read. Online, people are delighted to compare what actually happens in the book versus the cultural idea of Dracula. I was surprised reading it because I thought Dracula must be about this big vampire, but the heart of Dracula is about those who come together [because of him] and form these bonds of friendship and affection. Dracula’s just this monster scumbag that they have to deal with. That gap between what people expect the book to be and what the book actually is a fun surprise for folks.

Has anything else surprised you while running Dracula Daily?

Because of the way Dracula Daily is structured, some days you might get a paragraph [from the book], while some days you get a little more. Other days, you get nothing. When people only have a small bit of text to chew on, they really chew through it and find funny moments and throwaway lines. Like, on the very first day when Jonathan is writing about having paprika chicken—it blows his mind. It’s a spice he’s never had, and on Tumblr, the paprika discourse is people being like, is he really that English?

Will you run the newsletter again next year?

Every year, I think, surely this is it, nobody will want to read this again. But every year I get emails from librarians or teachers saying, “Hey, I want to organize something around this next year.” So, I’m 100 percent going to do it in 2024. After that, we’ll just see. It doesn’t take a lot of effort, but it’s also hard to imagine sending a Dracula email for the rest of my life.

Are there any other novels that you’re interested in serializing?

I don't think so. I love reading them this way, but there are so many other ones that have sprung up over the last year. There are hundreds of other classic novels that people are serializing. A lot of it is on Substack. Anything that I could think of doing, someone's already doing a great job at it—which is awesome, because it means I don't have to do any of that work. I can just be a subscriber.

Fair enough. Aside from Dracula, do you have any other favorite characters in the book?

I always want to know more about Renfield. He's kind of a mystery in the book. Another side character that’s talked about is the guy who writes all the newspaper clippings. People have made this imaginary character out of it. He’s a newspaper correspondent at Whippy that moved to London and got a job. He’s a go-getter.

As a Dracula fan, how do you feel about modern vampires? Do you like Edward Cullen and Nandor, or are you a Dracula purist?

The weird thing about my involvement with this is that I don't have a really high affection for vampire stuff. It’s fun, but it’s such a flexible idea. I love all of it. You can make vampires a modern and scary thing, or you can make them comedic like in What We Do in the Shadows. My fundamental vampire media was Buffy the Vampire Slayer,which is campy. It’s a fun trope to play with. I love them all.

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