Book Review: Dracula

 

Book Review: Dracula by Bram Stoker 

Goodreads Description: When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the 'Master' and his imminent arrival.

My Review: Every year from May to November, a substack newsletter called Dracula Daily sends out Bram Stoker's novel in bite-sized chunks to readers all over the world. Since Dracula is an epistolary novel with every entry dated, Dracula Daily is able to send each letter to you on the day it happens, making it seem like you've got a gaggle of eccentric, one-sided pen pals. This was how I got around to reading Dracula, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to sink their teeth into the daddy of all vampire stories. It breaks the novel down into digestible chunks, which makes reading a Classic™ far less intimidating, and gives readers a new way to get involved with the story. Plus, the building tension as days pass with no word from the characters does provide an extra little thrill. If you want to catch up on your classics, Book Riot compiled a list of substack newsletters you can subscribe to that were inspired by Dracula Daily. 

And now, for Dracula itself. Published near the end of the Victorian era, this book amalgamates many aspects of Victorian purity ideology in a way that's both fascinating and frustrating. It smacks you hard with female infantilization, back-hands you with virginal purity and promiscuous corruption, drowns you in white knight chivalry, and then spits a little extra xenophobia onto the plate for flavouring. Mina and Lucy are placed on pedestals, one lost to foreign corruption and sexuality while the other must be protected from it. It plays into a Christian heteronormative hierarchy that says while women are pure and good (and sometimes even smart and skilled, like Mina), they are still ultimately weaker than men and must be cared for like children. Despite Mina being a key player in the hunt for the Count, the men often leave her out of conversations or keep her in the dark for "her own protection," which can be irritating for modern readers. While those pieces may be annoying, Dracula also encapsulates this sexist, puritan ideology to such a perfect degree that it becomes fascinating to analyze. Count Dracula's foreign otherness, combined with his thirst for young, innocent girls, makes him an interesting caricature of what Victorians, and even some people today, think of as monstrous. 

Bram Stoker is a master of dread tension - the kind of creeping terror that defines the horror genre. It's the moment before the pounce, before the jump scare, where every hair is raised and something is screaming at you to RUN, even if there's no logical reason for it. The first quarter of the book, when Johnathan Harker travels to Count Dracula's castle, captures this feeling perfectly. Johnathan explores the castle and gets to know the count, all the while seeing strange sights and suffering from stranger afflictions. Despite numerous warnings, including a woman begging Johnathan to flee from the horrors to come, our naïve horror protagonist pushes on until it's far too late to turn back. The tension hovers at a perfect boiling point through much of the novel, though it does suffer later when vampire hunting devolves into paperwork and shipment tracking. To make a convoluted story short, Dracula hides in boxes of grave dirt and then ships himself out of the country, leaving our protagonists in a scramble to track down the box he's hiding in. While some complain that the Victorian bureaucracy grinds the narrative to a halt, Stoker manages to keep the stakes and tension high enough to carry readers through the duller bits. Plus, this aspect of the story places constraints on Dracula's power that makes his ultimate defeat feel reasonable. Dracula may be insanely powerful, but the 'rules' of his vampirism reduce him from a god-like figure into a mortal one. One can get the best of a vampire, so long as they know how. 

TL;DR: 4/5 stars. A dreadfully tense classic wrapped in Victorian puritan values.