Bram Stoker books including Dracula celebrated in today’s Google doodle

Bram Stoker would have turned 165 today, which still would have left him younger than his most famous literary invention, the arch-vampire Dracula.

Stoker’s post-death birthday was celebrated by today’s Google doodle linking to the search term “Bram Stoker Books” to show off the search service’s “open graph,” which highlights those books at the top of the search results.

Stoker’s Dracula essentially invented the modern vampire mythos. Before the novel, vampires and vampire folklore mostly portrayed the creatures as pathetic mindless beasts which rose from the grave to feast on the living (in fact, they were much closer to what we would now understand as zombies). Although a few instances of Stoker-like Vampires popped up earlier, it was Stoker who injected an element of dark romance and Christian sin into the idea of the vampire.