Dracula (1897)

I was expounding on my love of Dracula to my poor long-suffering mother yesterday, and realized I should probably confine my effusions to a more opt-in format.

I first read Dracula as a teenager, breathlessly turning pages of a library edition late at night while coyotes howled around the little bungalow where I was staying alone. Even as an adult, in less conducive conditions, the story holds up for me.

It is in deadly earnest, and the emotions are grand, the stakes high: if you can't put your cynicism aside, it probably isn't for you. It builds slowly, accumulating unease and unearthliness, until you reach the first vertiginous climax -- and then again, you return to normalcy, waiting to be slowly, sickly drawn to the next dramatic break in the fabric of the world. It takes a while to reach a breakneck pace, but it's well worth it.

I'd call Dracula an anxious book. Not just tense, or thrilling, but profoundly anxious. As a teenager, I found the Victorian anxiety about carnality and sex dripping from the pages interesting: Jonathan's revulsion from the incongruously lush lips of the Count, the menace of the castle ladies, and above all the hectic loveliness of Lucy. It's a terrifically clear look into the Victorian psyche, bringing the cultural subtext so close to the surface it pulses like an exposed vein.

As an adult, I've enjoyed the other thematic obsessions: the clash of science/technology/modernity with magic/superstition/occult; the West versus the East; the train and the typewriter set against ancestral earth and the evil eye; the pagan versus the holy; eternal carnal life at the cost of the heavenly beyond.

Perhaps others who aren't English majors, history readers, or obsessed with Victorian foibles and fables won't find those contrasts as compelling as I do, or greet the intrusion of shorthand, typewriters and railroad time tables with the same affection. But these themes play out on characters we care about, for all their occasional preciousness: the slightly fussy Jonathan, the garrulous Lucy, the careful and self-reliant Mina. They play out in deliciously high drama, memorable scenes, iconic images. A hundred years of progress and easing (or replacement) of cultural neuroses can't rob Dracula of its charm, its pathos, or its terror.

P.S. To audiobook readers: A multitude of unabridged productions exist, many of them with multiple readers to bring the diaries and letters of the various characters, male and female, English and Dutch, to life. I have bought, and often return to, the Brilliance Audio version. Most of the readers and accents are quite good, although Michael Page, who reads Seward's journals, is as usual scenery-chewing. I haven't tried the Audible original, chock full of famous names, so that might be another option -- but I do recommend getting one with multiple narrators, to really do the epistolary style justice. And do listen to samples -- there are some very fake English accents running around claiming to be Jonathan Harker of Exeter. ( )

my review is has been updated ( )

3-1/2 stars. I decided to round down this time. I did however like Dracula a lot. It was way overboard with the melodrama which, it turns out, didn't bother me as much as it does in other forms of entertainment. I haven't read anything else that measures up to it in that regard so maybe the 19th century use of the language softened the eye-rolling effect for me. I'm wondering how common the melodrama is in novels from the romantic period and how different authors from the period differed. The only other thing I recall at this moment having read from the period, so far, is Jane Austin (pretty much 100 years earlier) and I can't consider that a good comparison as I consider her to be genius on several levels. Dracula may drag in parts for a lot of people. It's not exactly a page turner for some stretches. It held my interest all the way through but I wasn't compelled to carry it with me through the day and I read other books during the reading of it as a result. The multiple points of view and the telling through the various journals was a great choice for this and used to excellent effect. That became even more pronounced after all parties had all left England and the novel started building toward its climax. There were several points where the story became quite exciting including pretty much the whole last quarter or so of the book. The difference in the use of the language between now and then combined with the broken English of Professor Van Helsing with all the mixed up tenses and cases was an experience - one requiring some patience sometimes and funny sometimes but not a problem. i have a few other gothic novels picked out for the very near future and am looking forward to them. ( )

Dracula movies told me what the original story was like, I thought - mistakenly. From the first page, I was as amazed at the skill of Bram Stoker in writing his story as I was at another time in opening Richard Nixon's autobiography and being stunned by the clarity of thought and excellence of perfection that he had achieved.

I read Dracula for a university course. Had I know it was as excellent a story as it is, I would have read it much earlier. I consider the book a true classic, something has already lasted for a short time, but will likely last a lot more time.

A few weak points were pointed out to me. But as long as I must engage my "suspension of belief" for the book as a whole, I have no problem excusing such errors.

I've thought of other authors I've read and tried to decide where Stoker's Dracula fits in among them. I don't think he does! I think Bram Stoker's Dracula is somehow unique. If I am able to read other tales of mystically powered, soulless masters of men's minds, then I may have a home for Dracula. Until then, his is a lone story that starts nobly apart from the other fictions there are - of Asimovian robots, Burroughnian warrior kings, C.S. Lewis' adventures in Pereland', and even Twilight. ( )

For me the telling of this story in letters and diary entries did a disservice to the whole, but it's a chilling and suspensful read. Too episodic for 5 stars. ( )