Dracula

Reading Dracula for me is a huge step outside of my comfort zones. My literary genres tend to be fantasy and science-fiction, and classical dramatic, and/or coming of age, feminist stories etc. I don't think I ever read a horror book, whilst the closest would be Du Maurier's Rebecca (which is Gothic, a genre shared by Dracula).

Dracula is also outside of my psychological comfort zone, as I've never been into vampires and tend to avoid novels where the possible levels of gory and bloody details would potentially trigger my hemophobia (= fear of blood), and in fact, I expected this to happen with this novel, as vampires, in all variations, suck their victims' blood.

I noticed that on several occasions, during reading, I was dozzing off and had at first attributed it to fatigue, the heat and the fan's white noise. I came to understand that it was also, at least in part, my sensitivity to the topics, as a way of my psyche's attempts to protect myself from reading unpleasant and graphic aspects. I this that's why it took me 3 weeks ago to finish.

Quickly after starting, I found myself drawn to Stocker's rich style and love that this novel is written in a form of journals and correspondance written by and between the main characters.

I also love how he gave each one of them a unique voice and interesting personality traits. Sometimes, this takes a form of grandiose dialogues with odd English syntax for foreign characters, whilst others have such a broken English, or thick accents that Bram composed with all the possible typos or abbreviations and slang that I had to decipher their supposed speaking patterns. (let me remind you that I am French, and that I self-taught English).

Each character shares his or her thoughts, sometimes feelings, even worries and fears, in varying degrees of detail.

I found that on a few occasions, Bram's own time-line had been faulty, as announced in footnotes - but, though this is a small flaw, it can be explained through the lack of computers in the late 19th century... Other times, his assumptions weren't very realistic - say, in travel speed.

I was agreeably surprised that the actual depictions of the vampire's bloodsucking were either limited in details, or described through indirect imagery. However, there were other difficult moments for me, in the form of a lunatic, zoophagous character, studied by another (zoophagous= carnivorous), in a scientific capacity, and I find that he has a sort of voyeuristic nature, and quite creepy. As an extremely sensitive vegan suffering from carnophobia, it was quite a challenge to read those parts, through which I tried to speed up and skim, though I didn't skip - not wanting to miss important details as to possible links I'd see between his story-line with the rest of the novel's plots.

Off course, each of these elements - the zoophagous character, the vampire, the blood-sucking, are allegories and social comments, and we also note that just like other authors of his period, Bram include a bit of antisemitism that was quite present in his days, though he seems to have done far less often than Brontë did in Jane Eyre.

These allegories include the most evident transposition for sex (the blood part), and also, the cult of personality through one character's idolization - indeed like revering a god, and I really liked how this part was developed and concluded.

It's interesting to note that because society was in a transitional period, Bram's women characters in Dracula oscillate between servitude to the men characters, and signs of yearnings to break free of male dominance.

For me, the heavy Christian slants of this book are just like the rest of what I think of religious precepts, dogmas and characters : it's all a vast myth. Thus, the weapons imaged to fight the vampire are direct results of Christian beliefs, that I don't follow. I read this is a fantasy aspect, added to the rest of it.

Dracula, as I said, was a very different novel for me, stepping totally outside of my comfort zone. I enjoyed it's style, narrative form and interesting social commentary, though this folk-tale, mythological, allegorical novel.

• I've read very few footnotes and none of the extensive additional, non-fictional parts at the end of the book, which comprises contexts (329-360) reviews and reactions (361-367), dramatic and film variations (370-407) and , criticism (409-482) , Bram Stocker : a chronology (483-485) and selected bibliography (487-488)

Just a list of thoughts I had as I thought them:

• Very enjoyable, fast read.
• A little bit too much of all the characters basically falling in love with each other on first meeting and becoming best friends. A lot of “oh won’t you be my best friend for life now since we’ve been through this together?”
• Characters are a little dumb in places where they really shouldn’t be. They literally just got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a bat, and then Quincy sees the bats sitting outside the windows staring at them and they don’t think anything more of it when it flies away.
• Same with how they got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a mist and a control the fog, and Mina goes up to her room and sees the fog coming at her and sees them mist in her room, and everybody sees her getting paler and paler, and they don’t think anything of it.
• Surprisingly scary in places, and even more surprisingly gorey. Not what I expected from a book of the time period.
• On a similar note, a lot more baby-eating and baby-murder than I was expecting.
• Re: Lucy – not everyone has the same blood type. I’m surprised this didn’t come up as a possibility to either Van Helsing or Dr. Steward when Lucy continued failing in health after all the men gave her blood.
• The ending was a let down after how good the rest of the book was. Build for 200+ pages to this epic climax, to then have it all wrapped up over the course of 2 or 3 pages.
• There is a potential Coens Brothers-esque film here in which no vampire exists. Just a nice old count who desperately wants to escape the overly supersticious and paranoid people of rural run-down Romania to move to modern, upbeat London, but is harrassed and eventually murdered by a psychotic professor and a schizophrenic realtor and their cohorts. Do it Hollywood!

Highly recommended; 4 out of 5 vampire bats for general audiences.

The original novel is a great read. Not just for the way it codified modern vampire lore. But for the way it's built entirely out of diary entries, letters, news fragments, telegrams and so on. For the way it shows modern science coming to grips with ancient superstition and figuring out how to deal with it. For showing an early example of a woman participating in her own rescue. And for some of the parts that didn't make it into general pop culture. (Count Dracula spends an awful lot of time in a shipping box.)

In some senses it's the written-word equivalent of the "found footage" horror genre. Except the "sources" are wildly varying. John and Mina write their journals and letters to each other in shorthand. Business letters are of course written formally. Dr. Seward keeps an audio diary on a phonograph. Van Helsing's speech is rendered with every quirk of his Dutch accent and speech patterns. And then halfway through the book, when all the major characters finally come together...they collate all the documents and Mina transcribes them on a typewriter, and they pass around the first half of the book so they can all read up on what the rest of them have been doing! (Literally getting them all on the same page.)

That's not to say it's flawless. It's unclear why some victims rise again as vampires while others don't. While the science/superstition contrast works well for the most part, eastern Europeans don't exactly come off very well. Especially when they'd talk about the "gypsies" carrying Dracula around Transylvania. I mean, it could have been a lot worse, but it's still jarring.

Overall, though, it's an engaging read, whether approached as a book or, as Dracula Daily did, one day's letters at a time from May 3 through November 7.

Dracula Daily: draculadaily.substack.com/archive

This review on my website: hyperborea.org/reviews/books/dracula/

I had never given classic horror a go before, but this one was a pleasant surprise. The original Dracula story was something I thought I knew, elements like Dracula’s castle and the power possessed by that monster make an appearance here, but despite what you might expect of the original vampire, the book is still filled with great characters and moments that were truly nerve-wracking.

I couldn’t help but read faster and faster at times where the tension raised up, hoping for it to end when it was only getting worse. But its not all bad, there is always hope, and the determination of the characters to defend their loved ones and the future of humanity from the reign of the un-dead, is just great, but a few moments of old English were a little hard to read.

I listened to different audiobooks while reading, which was quite atmospheric too.

(Review originally written April 1st, 2022)