Dracula as System

Dracula has long been read as a story of horror, sexuality, disease, invasion, and forbidden desire. But beneath those familiar interpretations lies another architecture: a system built to extract life, create dependency, conceal depletion, and convert devotion into service.

In Dracula as System, Zoë Roberts examines Bram Stoker's novel as more than a battle between civilization and a supernatural predator. Dracula is not merely a monster. He is an organizing force. He enters homes, institutions, bodies, relationships, and networks, feeding through structures that allow his power to travel while disguising the damage he causes. Renfield becomes the model servant of extraction, mistaking proximity to power for personal elevation. Lucy's decline appears mysterious until the system surrounding her becomes visible. Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, the Demeter, Carfax Abbey, and the hunters themselves all reveal how movement, information, property, loyalty, and dependence can be reorganized around predation.

Drawing together Gothic literature, systems analysis, political economy, psychology, and institutional theory, Roberts argues that Stoker created a remarkably modern account of hidden power. The vampire survives not simply because he is strong, but because the people around him initially encounter isolated symptoms rather than a recognizable pattern.

This is a book about what happens when extraction presents itself as protection, when dependence masquerades as devotion, and when human flourishing is slowly converted into fuel for a system that cannot live on its own.

Dracula as System offers a new way to read a familiar novel and a new language for recognizing the structures that continue to feed on human life.