I found the first section, in Transylvania, highly enjoyable and pretty chilling. The next part, about Lucy, wasn't as good, but still gripped me at times. Her supposed caretakers were a bit too bumbling to be believed, but they didn't know what they were up against, so I suppose that's all right. The last two parts, about the detective work and the trip to Romania for the showdown were too long-winded - by about page 300 (of 462) I just wanted to get to the payoff.

I also don't see why all the stuff about Renfield needed to be in there. To me, it really slowed the story down without advancing it in any noticeable way.

All in all I'm glad I finally read Dracula, but don't see any reason why I'll ever be reading it again. ( )

So much better than I thought it would be. You know what interests me about Dracula? That a vampire book written in the 1800s has a more kick-ass female character (that would be Mina Harker) than a certain popular sparkling pony princess series I could name.

Sure it's denser than it needs to be, with far more words than necessary, but that was the style of the times, no?

And frankly, the bit about Dracula crawling down the wall (early on in the book) somehow managed to be one of the single scariest things I've ever read. ( )

stoker is not a "good" writer to my mind . . . he exercises superfluous adjectives, sentences, and passages. He uses the epistlatory POV -- unweldy if not improbable for a horror story! I may say this only once in my life, but please do not read the book; rather, enjoy one of the many excellent films. ( )

I'm not going to add my review to the millions of previous reviews but I will say I thoroughly enjoyed it yet again. The last time I read this I was staying at an old schoolhouse (rented and now sadly converted into a hotel) at Sandsend a few miles north of Whitby, not far from Mulgrave Woods that Mina & Lucy hike to. I was going to finish the book on my last day there, which I'd planned to do from the cliff tops overlooking the harbour mouth and the final doomed course of the Demeter, near the Abbey and the graveyards (during the day of course) but the weather turned stormy and I had to complete it indoors. ( )

Genuinely terrifying. The method of using people's diaries and letters to move the plot along adds much to the atmosphere. ( )