Book Review: Dracula

 

© 1897 by Bram Stoker

I’m kinda ashamed of myself, amateur literati of science fiction, fantasy, and horror that I claim to be, that I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Yeah, I saw the Bela Lugosi black-and-white Universal movie as a kid. I saw the Christopher Lee Hammer version around the same time. And not only did I see Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I even visited his vineyard, which has an entire wing devoted to all his film memorabilia. As the lady giving us our tour said, quoting the great director, and I’m paraphrasing: “Godfather bought me a mansion in Napa; Dracula bought me the vineyard.”

Well, this year I cracked it. Took me about ten nights over the course of … thirteen days … to finish it, read over the Halloween holiday down here, just as the nights are starting to turn a bit crisp. It was a good mood setter, as I read most of it at night after everyone went to bed, in the semi-darkness of my living room. I’m glad I now have this notch in my reading shelf, along with Frankenstein read a few weeks earlier. This was like a bucket-list kinda thing.

First thing to note, is that, similar to Frankenstein, Dracula is an epistolary novel. That is, a novel made up of letters, or, more specifically, diary entries. It seems everyone not only kept a diary at the end of the 19th century, but all these diarists were quite prolix and prolific. No detail escapes the pens of these observers, all presumably written in the twilight hours before sleep. Even dialects are written out in their diaries phonetically.

The 19th century epistolary letter is like the “found footage” movie phenomenon that began with The Blair Witch Project and continues twenty-five years later to this day. And readers of epistolary novels must do what viewers of found footage movies must do: suspend belief, and allow the story to unfold, however it may be told.

Which is what I did.

In truth the experience was a mixed bag. I’ll assume you know the story; the Lugosi and Coppola films do not deviate too much from it. The novel can be divided into three parts: Jonathan Harker and the Count at the castle, the turning of Lucy and the reaction of her three suitors, and the hunting of Dracula. The first part I found creepy and page-turning, though I couldn’t get the image of Keanu Reeves out of my head. I thought the second, by-far-longest part regarding Lucy, though eerie in areas (“Bloofer Lady”), dragged a lot. I bet in abridged versions of the novel this section is cut nearly in half. The third part, which begins with Van Helsing’s exposition regarding the Count, was quite interesting in a cat-and-mouse way. This was the best part.

I liked how Stoker dropped some clues through Van Helsing of the vampire’s origin, such as veiled references to a school of the devil (which I had heard about from other sources years ago). Whether truth or myth, it was legitimately spooky. I enjoyed how the Count stayed one step ahead of his pursuers, and even tried to bluff his way to overwhelm them with his powers. Stoker portrays the vampire as a filthy evil beast deserving of no sympathy, and he got none. However, I did feel a pang of sympathy for the one of Lucy’s suitors who succumbs to his wounds in the fight with Dracula at the very end.

Overall, I award the novel a B+.

It got me thinking of what else should be on the bucket list regarding horror. In my twenties I read a lot of it, mostly King and Koontz. But since then, reading three or four horror books a year, I filled in the holes in the history or horror quite nicely. A lot of Lovecraft and Poe. Forays into modern horror with Clive Barker and Peter Straub. Classics here and there like The Haunting of Hill House, The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, and The Terror, to name but a few.

But what else? Who else?

Nothing really sticks out at me as far as modern horror goes. I do have a curious interest in gothic horror of the middle to late 1700s. Maybe for next Halloween I’ll read The Castle of Otranto (1764) or Vathek (1786) or The Monk (1796). It all depends on what I can find and what my gut tells me about each book. Oh well. The quest continues …