Dracula Illustrated

Just a list of thoughts I had as I thought them:

• Very enjoyable, fast read.
• A little bit too much of all the characters basically falling in love with each other on first meeting and becoming best friends. A lot of “oh won’t you be my best friend for life now since we’ve been through this together?”
• Characters are a little dumb in places where they really shouldn’t be. They literally just got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a bat, and then Quincy sees the bats sitting outside the windows staring at them and they don’t think anything more of it when it flies away.
• Same with how they got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a mist and a control the fog, and Mina goes up to her room and sees the fog coming at her and sees them mist in her room, and everybody sees her getting paler and paler, and they don’t think anything of it.
• Surprisingly scary in places, and even more surprisingly gorey. Not what I expected from a book of the time period.
• On a similar note, a lot more baby-eating and baby-murder than I was expecting.
• Re: Lucy – not everyone has the same blood type. I’m surprised this didn’t come up as a possibility to either Van Helsing or Dr. Steward when Lucy continued failing in health after all the men gave her blood.
• The ending was a let down after how good the rest of the book was. Build for 200+ pages to this epic climax, to then have it all wrapped up over the course of 2 or 3 pages.
• There is a potential Coens Brothers-esque film here in which no vampire exists. Just a nice old count who desperately wants to escape the overly supersticious and paranoid people of rural run-down Romania to move to modern, upbeat London, but is harrassed and eventually murdered by a psychotic professor and a schizophrenic realtor and their cohorts. Do it Hollywood!

Highly recommended; 4 out of 5 vampire bats for general audiences.

The original novel is a great read. Not just for the way it codified modern vampire lore. But for the way it's built entirely out of diary entries, letters, news fragments, telegrams and so on. For the way it shows modern science coming to grips with ancient superstition and figuring out how to deal with it. For showing an early example of a woman participating in her own rescue. And for some of the parts that didn't make it into general pop culture. (Count Dracula spends an awful lot of time in a shipping box.)

In some senses it's the written-word equivalent of the "found footage" horror genre. Except the "sources" are wildly varying. John and Mina write their journals and letters to each other in shorthand. Business letters are of course written formally. Dr. Seward keeps an audio diary on a phonograph. Van Helsing's speech is rendered with every quirk of his Dutch accent and speech patterns. And then halfway through the book, when all the major characters finally come together...they collate all the documents and Mina transcribes them on a typewriter, and they pass around the first half of the book so they can all read up on what the rest of them have been doing! (Literally getting them all on the same page.)

That's not to say it's flawless. It's unclear why some victims rise again as vampires while others don't. While the science/superstition contrast works well for the most part, eastern Europeans don't exactly come off very well. Especially when they'd talk about the "gypsies" carrying Dracula around Transylvania. I mean, it could have been a lot worse, but it's still jarring.

Overall, though, it's an engaging read, whether approached as a book or, as Dracula Daily did, one day's letters at a time from May 3 through November 7.

Dracula Daily: draculadaily.substack.com/archive

This review on my website: hyperborea.org/reviews/books/dracula/

I had never given classic horror a go before, but this one was a pleasant surprise. The original Dracula story was something I thought I knew, elements like Dracula’s castle and the power possessed by that monster make an appearance here, but despite what you might expect of the original vampire, the book is still filled with great characters and moments that were truly nerve-wracking.

I couldn’t help but read faster and faster at times where the tension raised up, hoping for it to end when it was only getting worse. But its not all bad, there is always hope, and the determination of the characters to defend their loved ones and the future of humanity from the reign of the un-dead, is just great, but a few moments of old English were a little hard to read.

I listened to different audiobooks while reading, which was quite atmospheric too.

(Review originally written April 1st, 2022)