Can I say how incredibly excited I was to read Bram Stoker’s Dracula? It is the literary work of art that started it all! There would be no Twilight or Edward Cullen without the Grand Pubah that is Dracula! I am grateful to its existence for that reason and believe it deserves a high level of respect for never going out of print since its debut in 1897! 112 years of longevity, baby! Oww! However, I found myself conflicted between the longing I’ve always had for the more romantic and simple era and my modern expectations of what a horror story should be.
The seven main characters in Dracula, minus its namesake, form a union to eradicate the evil that is the ‘undead’ and all that it has infected, to include England. After a young and beautiful acquaintance of theirs is struck down with a strange blood disorder, or so it’s believed to be, they make this their sole mission. The two most distinctive characters were Dracula and the mentor-hero, Dr. Abraham VanHelsing. These are the only characters that Stoker takes the time to give detailed physical descriptions of! He even bestows his own first name to the good doctor. After much research, Dracula’s character emerges out of the history books and is brought back to life based on a real fifteenth century Wallacian warrior prince, aka “Vlad the Impaler.” So Drac’s not from Transylvania, people! Stick that in your Trivial Pursuit and sit on it!
If you consider yourself a bit of a ‘Nosey Nelly’ and would just love to get your hands on your neighbors mail or your daughters diary, you will love the fact that this entire novel is written in the form of personal documents ranging from journal entries, to news articles, to even telegrams. This form of writing does chronologically jump around, but also gives you various characters perspectives of the story line.
There are many editions of this book in print. I read the version that includes a Foreword by Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian. She drew inspiration from Bram Stoker’s Dracula in writing her novel and I was convinced of her deep love for this story. It was extremely interesting to read her interpretation of Stoker’s thinking behind his writings and how it may have all tied into his own life experiences. The Foreword may have actually been my favorite part of this book!
I give Dracula Three, Three Vixen Pumps! AH AH AH AH! (Okay, bad “Count from Sesame Street” impression, just couldn’t let THAT opportunity pass me by?) I have to take one pump away for the lack of suspense. Back in the late 19th Century, readers considered this novel overly suspenseful but it just doesn’t measure up with today’s expectations of the genre. I took another pump away for the difficulty in reading the various European accents (albeit, comical at times) and English dialect that was common in Victorian England.
