Everyone has a hefty classic sitting on their bookshelf collecting dust that they swear they’ll eventually get to but never do. Matt Kirkland has made a side project of helping some of those intimidated readers: Over 262,000 have signed up to read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula" serialized in his free Substack newsletter, Dracula Daily.

Kirkland, 42, works as a full-time web designer in Lawrence, Kan. After he re-read a copy of “Dracula” during the pandemic, he came up with the idea of republishing the epistolary novel split into 110 parts as a newsletter. Kirkland schedules Dracula Daily to send one section each day on dates that correspond to the novel’s letters, journal entries and newsletter articles, prefaced by a joke he writes. He started the May 16 newsletter, which contains an entry from one of the main character’s journals, with “Hold on a minute, you're telling me Dracula has roommates?”