2013 read #9: Dracula by Bram Stoker.

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.