The essay offers an analysis of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), a text which encapsulates different kinds of darkness, belonging to urban Gothic fiction and to the visual arts. In Dracula, darkness is defined as places, characterised by the realistic topography of darkness. These places are the unenlightened superstitious villages of Transylvania, and in greater detail the urban darkness of criminal London. But darkness is not always topographically placed on the map of the metropolis. The category of darkness is made less definite, more vague and psychologically upsetting owning to the experience of hypnosis to which Mina Murray Harker is subjected, and with the dreams occurring to several characters. Such underdefined darkness could be associated with the visual space described by James McNeill Whistler’s as ‘Nocturne’. The long friendship of Whistler and Stoker dates back to their days in Dublin. The Nocturne was the object of the famous trial Whistler vs. John Ruskin. The essay suggests that in Dracula Stoker adopts two versions of darkness: the discursive and documental narrative and the nocturne aesthetic effect, in order to add tension to the reader-response device, inasmuch as the reader is constantly invited to move within and without the firm horizon of fin-de-siècle knowledge.