Dracula by Bram Stoker
389 pages
Published 1897
Read from January 13 to January 17
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
When I first asked for book recommendations, Jory said, "If you haven't read Bram Stoker's Dracula, consider that an
October reading goal." Here we are in the middle of January, but heck, I
can't be bothered with such petty trifles as the calendar.
Fans
of the book are quick to assert that it's legitimately scary, even if
its contributions to popular vampire mythos have become cliches and
props for comedy: the superstitious peasants, the creepy old castle, the
pallid Transylvanian dressed all in black, the garlic, the crosses, the
mirrors, the bats, the fainting maidens. It doesn't help that Stoker
emerged before such prose innovations as "Begin with a hook" and "Keep
your action rising to the climax." When the first four pages were
nothing but talk of train schedules and paprika chicken dishes, I set my
teeth and expected a grim Victorian slog through pointless minutiae. I
also craved paprika chicken in the worst way.
On page five,
however, I got hooked. When he wants it to be, Stoker's prose is as
crisp and modern as Wells at his acme (and I've long told anyone who
will listen that The Invisible Man, despite its pacing issues, was the first and best modern technothriller). Dracula
is a brisk read, in parts -- the tension builds steadily and pulls you
along, etc. Standard review copy crap. But only in parts. The Victorian
vogue for caricaturing working class accents is tedious even in the most
expert hands, and Stoker does not number in that company. If I have to
slow down and carefully translate the implausibly long speeches of
Yorkshire sailors and Cockney zookeepers, I get annoyed. I had to put
the book aside and read something else for a while whenever I got to one
of the "newspaper articles," just to recharge my motivation. (If
they're representative of authentic Victorian news-copy, Wells' relative
talent for getting to the point is all the more remarkable.) And to be
quite frank, my love of the epistolary novel died sometime in the mid
'90s. I'm sure there are good epistolary novels out there, but it's far
from my favorite structure. After a climactic scene halfway through, Dracula
ground to a halt for something like twenty pages so that the surviving
main characters could talk about typing up and reading each other's
letters and journals, and press each other's hands and tearfully swear
eternal friendship. These catching-up-on-journals and
swearing-eternal-friendship motifs are repeated with enervating effect
every few pages for the rest of the damn book.
Speaking of the
mid '90s, the scene where (spoilers? can you spoil a 116 year old book?)
Lucy gets a stake driven through her heart felt oddly familiar. When I
was a kid (10 to 12 years old, roughly), Walmart sold these 50¢ editions
of various classics. Getting our father to buy even the cheapest of
books was like pulling teeth, but my brother and I (mostly I) managed to
accumulate a miniature classics library in a couple years. Dracula
may have been one of the books my brother picked out. I'm fairly
certain I never read it myself, but that one scene is maddeningly
familiar, and associated with the cheap paperbacks of my youth. Did my
brother make me read it to see how scared I'd get? Or did it simply
remind me of some other 50¢ book I read back then? Maybe a scene in Frankenstein is similar; I haven't read that in about fifteen years, so who knows.
I'm
not sure how I feel about Gothic horror as a genre. "Overheated" would
be an obvious but apt adjective for its sexualized-yet-repressed
moralizing. Personally I favor comparisons to the era's ghoulish
medico-cultural obsession with blood: Dracula is at turns flushed
and pallid, Stoker's plots and characters swollen purple or drained
sallow. The endlessly repeated Victorian truism about gender roles --
men must be the strength, women must be the pure hope and inspiration
for their deeds -- was fucking tedious. But it comes with the territory.
Dracula wasn't bad. My interest just... wandered. Which is why
I've been reading three other books alongside it, a bad habit that's
doubtless slowing down my reading.
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