Bookworms: Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

What do you think, readers? Is Dracula still scary in the 21st Century? Is he best depicted as a fiend in horror films or is he just a big joke these days? NerdSpan writer Phil Redbeard takes us back to the novel that made Dracula a household name.

“Dracula? Poncy bugger owes me £11, for one thing.” – Spike

Stalker of the night, sucker of blood, recruiter of brides, eschewer of daylight, repellee of garlic- ladies and gentlenerds, I give you: DRACULA!

Ahem. Sorry, I got a bit overdramatic there. But, it is hard not to. Dracula is a great, long, melodramatic read. Written just before the turn of the century (no, not the last one, the one before that) it was not the first vampire novel but it was by far the most popular and the most influential, which is perhaps why I expected more from it. All the critical elements, that are by now so very cliche and overgrown, are present and accounted for. Unless your name is Rip Van Winkle or you’ve been sleeping in a coffin the past few years and know nothing of vampires, Dracula will be very familiar to you. There are stakes, holy water, extreme and acute anemia, and perhaps surprising to a few of you: no damn sparkles. (Vampires just don’t sparkle. They don’t. Edward is a glitzy creep, not a vampire.)

I am trying not to unfairly malign a classic book, but I think a huge part of my negative reaction to Dracula is rooted in the current pop culture over-saturation with the vampyre. Once upon a time, vampires were like any other creature from horror novels: not mainstream. Now we have vampires in the movies, vampires on tv, vampires in my cereal bowl and vampires helping me to count. They’ve have ceased to be intriguing or interesting (for the most part, for me) because they are everywhere. I readily acknowledge when True Blood is over and Twilight is remembered no more and even my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer fades into the dim annals of time, then Dracula may be more engrossing.

While there are no elements of science in this novel, I lump Dracula in with early science fiction literature because like Frankenstein, Dracula was early enough to the overall horror genre and 20th century that it influenced much of the literature and other media that followed. Quite generally, the story is the classic vampire story: mysterious deaths in which victims are drained of blood frighten a countryside, a doctor and expert in evil, Van Helsing, is called in to consult, and eventually the mysterious Count Dracula is suspected of being more than he seems and the hunt is on. There is a bit more there, but not much. As I’ve said, every single aspect to this story was immediately recognizable and familiar to me, mostly because it has been copied and redone to undeath. Also because of the multiplicity of vampire stories, the plot and storyline of the book were obvious to me from the beginning. I knew exactly what was going to happen, and merely had to wait for it to happen. There was no suspense. I know intellectually that when Dracula was first written and read, audiences had very little idea what to expect and the story was fresh and frightening, but I simply could not achieve any novelty for myself. I will stop and place a little of blame of Bram Stoker. He belabored his story to the extreme. Most of the middle of the book revolves around an innocent woman whom Dracula is visiting every night for, um, sustenance, and Van Helsing tries desperately to keep her alive and figure out the mystery of what is happening to her and why she is losing blood almost nightly. This doesn’t just happen once or twice, it takes places for weeks, which in the book, is hundreds of pages. I wish I was making that up, but I’m not. Reading the exact same scenario over and over got boring.

Secondly, I don’t think Stoker’s chosen style helped things. Dracula is not a Point A to Point B novel. It is a collection of supposedly “found” or recovered materials and is comprised of correspondence in the form of letters between two socialite women, a man and his sister, the journals of a few different people (including the dictated research of Van Helsing) and none of it was edited for conciseness by the assembler of the materials. Thus the two women at the beginning of the novel endlessly discuss their love lives and the various older men they try to ensnare in marriage, with only passing references to anything vampirery that might be occurring, or characters who might become important later on. Very little of interest happens during three fourths of the novel, and what does transpire is usually recounted after the fact or written down consciously as a history and thus is robbed of any immediacy or dramatic tension. Again, I wish I were exaggerating, but Stoker didn’t exactly pick the best way to keep a reader interested. [Author’s note: By the way, forget Hugh Jackman. A more accurate portrayal of Van Helsing would probably be Albert Finney or James Cromwell.]

Ordinarily, I would recommend that a classic book be read in lieu of current reinterpretations of the subject manner, but unless you have a lot of time to kill and don’t mind knowing exactly what is going to happen a hundred pages from where you are currently reading, I would say skipping Dracula isn’t any great loss. Come back to it in twenty years when the vampire craze has faded like disco and VHS and perhaps it will be more worth the time. I plan to, if only to give a more balanced review than I am able to provide at the moment. For now: let sleeping vamps lie.

Note: The “horror films” link at the top is sponsored.

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