Dracula

Novel, Bram Stoker, 1897

As a Twilight fan (sort of), I felt I owed it to myself to read Dracula.  My dad--who writes an intelligent and entertaining blog over here--has told me that he thought it was one of the scariest books he's ever read.  (Dad, if you're reading this and I'm misquoting you, my apologies.)  I'm not sure if I agree with that, but it was pretty creepy for sure.

500 pages! Ah ah ah!

I thought I knew the basic story of Dracula, but I think that was actually mostly based on the Count from Sesame Street.  So for anyone else in that situation, here's an overview: A circle of friends is plagued by a mysterious demon, so they call in Van Helsing, noted professor of crazy stuff, and together try to identify and destroy the evil force.

To be a little more specific: The book (written in an epistolary style with contributions from all the major characters) begins with the diary of Jonathan Harker, who has been sent by his employer to Transylvania to help a certain Count Dracula get the purchase of his new England home in order. (Gotta love those international real estate agents who make a lot of house calls.)  This is the longest contiguous section of the book, as Harker describes the at-best-unnerving and at-times-downright-terrifying experience of staying in Castle Dracula.  Spoiler alert--he makes it out, but Dracula too makes it to England, and all of a sudden people start dropping like flies.  The middle section of the book concerns a girl named Lucy, who is Jonathan's wife, Mina's, best friend, and her torment by an elusive monster of some sort--bet you can't guess what.  The rest of the books finds our heroes figuring out how to corner and kill the Count and the obstacles they encounter in trying to do so.

Bela Lugosi. Shiver-tastic.

Dracula is WAY longer than I expected it to be.  I read it on my Kindle (it's free! yay copyright law) so I didn't have a clear sense of how long it was when I started.  Not gonna lie, that middle part was really slow reading.  The whole Lucy part is also dragged out by the story of this guy Renfield, who's in an insane asylum and has a bug-eating fetish and seems to be connected to the Count somehow.  None of it seemed to be all that relevant to the major story line.  I really enjoyed the major story line when we did get around to it, though, and found Harker's opening account and the build-up to the climax to be thrilling.

I don't read a lot of Victorian novels these days, so I don't have a huge frame of reference for this, but it was very strange to me that the men in the novel took a very worshipful attitude to Lucy and Mina, the main female characters.  Everything the girls did was pronounced endearing, charming, witty, intelligent, and they were of course angelically beautiful at all times.  That oddity aside, I really liked that Mina was involved in the action and shown as a heroine, because I guess I was expecting that women in a book from this era would be more... dainty--cf. those crazy Bennets in Pride and Prejudice.  The Wikipedia article on the book suggests that there is a lot of critical literature about the roles of gender and sexuality in the novel (oh, did I mention that there are also these wild ghost vampire women who want to either have sex with or suck the blood of everyone? pretty interesting stuff there), which I would be interested in reading.

It was evolutionarily beneficial for Dracula's kind
to develop sparkles and foofy hair.

This post is getting longer than I intended, which is either because the book is long or because it is the masterpiece that many have called it so I end up having a lot to say about it.  So just a couple more points in bullet form:

• In this age of Twihards and vampire mania, it does get tedious when the characters spend the first half of the book wondering where these mysterious bite marks on the neck could have come from, but I can imagine that it would have made for a great mystery when vampire lore was less common.
• The mood of the book is one of its greatest strengths.  I felt more Gothic just reading it.  It made me want a fireplace and a cold winter night.  Just thinking about the castle makes me hear an ominous thunderclap.
• I bet there are some pretty good abridged versions of this book out there (if you believe that such a thing exists in principle, which I'm not sure I do.  But it might be worth looking into.)

Next up for me is Dune, which is also a doozy for length, I think.  Maybe I will post some status updates on the way through that one.  You can check out how far I am by being my friend on my new Goodreads account!  (Goodreads is sort of like Netflix meets Facebook but all about books.  It's awesome.)