Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mburnamfink 's review for:
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Dracula is one of the foundations of modern horror. It is creepy, gothic, terrifying in dimensions sexual, psychological, and geographical. It is also a lumpy epistolary, and continually brought down by its characters.
You know the basic plot. Lawyer goes to darkest Transylvania, where he helps the mysterious Count Dracula move himself to London. Young ladies start weirdly dying with neck bites, and it's up to Professor Van Helsing and a crack team of vampire hunters to defeat this ancient undead and save the day.
The problem is that I couldn't stand many of the characters. Of the ladies, Mina is okay, but her friend Lucy is a gormless sack of Victorian mush. Dr. Seward is utter waste of page count, accurate describing without a perspective of his own. And Van Helsing is said to be a genius, but comes across more as a doddering pedant. Dracula and his brides are riveting when they appear, which is sadly infrequently. The book is about two acts too long, and the more familiar Balderston/Universal 1931 adaptation compresses characters and cuts long sections to good effect.
One thing that I did actually enjoy was Dracula as a contemporary thriller, with the protagonists using late Victorian technology like telegraphs, steam launches, and Winchester rifles to get an advantage over Count Dracula (who is, by the way, killed with a Bowie knife and kukri). One theme which the book presented, but didn't seem to know what to do with, was science vs. horror. Both Van Helsing and Seward are medical men, rational observers. Yet them seem to have little to say on ancient folklore about garlic repelling vampires being accurate, or about Christian items like the cross and host being capable of halting vampires. I don't know what the default 1897 worldview was, but I'd reconsider my atheism if God could shoot invisible lasers that made monsters die. Stoker invokes these kinds of absolute notions of good and evil reflexively, but perhaps us modern decadents need a little more help in explaining why "good" symbols defeat the "evil" of vampires.
You know the basic plot. Lawyer goes to darkest Transylvania, where he helps the mysterious Count Dracula move himself to London. Young ladies start weirdly dying with neck bites, and it's up to Professor Van Helsing and a crack team of vampire hunters to defeat this ancient undead and save the day.
The problem is that I couldn't stand many of the characters. Of the ladies, Mina is okay, but her friend Lucy is a gormless sack of Victorian mush. Dr. Seward is utter waste of page count, accurate describing without a perspective of his own. And Van Helsing is said to be a genius, but comes across more as a doddering pedant. Dracula and his brides are riveting when they appear, which is sadly infrequently. The book is about two acts too long, and the more familiar Balderston/Universal 1931 adaptation compresses characters and cuts long sections to good effect.
One thing that I did actually enjoy was Dracula as a contemporary thriller, with the protagonists using late Victorian technology like telegraphs, steam launches, and Winchester rifles to get an advantage over Count Dracula (who is, by the way, killed with a Bowie knife and kukri). One theme which the book presented, but didn't seem to know what to do with, was science vs. horror. Both Van Helsing and Seward are medical men, rational observers. Yet them seem to have little to say on ancient folklore about garlic repelling vampires being accurate, or about Christian items like the cross and host being capable of halting vampires. I don't know what the default 1897 worldview was, but I'd reconsider my atheism if God could shoot invisible lasers that made monsters die. Stoker invokes these kinds of absolute notions of good and evil reflexively, but perhaps us modern decadents need a little more help in explaining why "good" symbols defeat the "evil" of vampires.