Reviews with content warning for Xenophobia - Dracula

Reviews tagging 'Xenophobia'

Dracula by Bram Stoker

75 reviews

mmefish's review against another edition

adventurous dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Terrifying in the best way possible, “Dracula” is an iconic piece of literature for a reason.
If only the lengthy dramatic exclamations by the characters were cut by half…

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leanne_miron's review against another edition

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dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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samsonian's review against another edition

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dark funny mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

i love this book so much its so gay

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soupply's review against another edition

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adventurous tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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1quillb's review against another edition

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challenging dark slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

First of all, I’m very disappointed that Dracula only showed up on probably 40 pages out of the 400 in my book. But to be fair, on most of those other pages absolutely nothing happened. And second of all, that ending? Did he run out of pages and just word-vomit onto the page to meet the deadline?
So, with full and complete offence meant to Abraham “Bram” Stoker: this book sucked. Horribly.

I’m not entirely sure what happened in it, to be honest. Jonathan goes to Dracula’s castle and gets trapped there. A man called Renfield eats spiders but really wants to eat a cat. Mina sits in a churchyard with her girlfriend Lucy. Lucy gets proposed to three times by men she’d literally spoken to one time… it was just random plot point after random plot point, none of which made sense in any sort of context.
And the entire second-half of the book was devoted to… you guess it, absolutely nothing! They decide that vampires are indeed real (though it takes them some time to come to that conclusion even after they see one), and then they go to Dracula’s castle. Why? I don’t know. Dracula wasn’t even there.
Then, for about the last ten pages of the novel, they have a metaphorical snowball fight and start stabbing random Romanians. Obviously the Romanians lost, because they were exhausted from spending the last dozen hours carrying Dracula’s coffin up the mountainside because the Count was too lazy to walk. But luckily “he” dies!
Who is “he”, you may ask? Apparently, it’s Dracula, because later on the characters rejoice in the fact that they killed the vampire, but Bram literally didn’t even write that it was Dracula who died. Nor did he specify if it was Jonathan or Morris who was stabbed by a Romanian. Only in the epilogue is it made clear (a dead man can’t have children, I don’t think).

Overall, this was terrible. I’ve not read anything else by Stoker, so I don’t know if this hideous novel was just a one-off or if it’s actually how he writes, but it sucked regardless. Highly don’t recommend.

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gwrhyr's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Whilst the book is beautifully written, the characters are all exceptionally ignorant in favour of withholding information from the reader.

Van Helsing knows exactly what is happening to Lucy, yet he does not seem to care enough to share his theories. Lucy's death could have easily been avoided had Van Helsing been a little less secretive.

Then there is the error of Van Helsing being a Dutchman from Amsterdam, yet speaking German.

Not to mention the whole blood transfusions affair. Blood types were discovered four years after the publishing of Dracula, so Lucy is unbelievably lucky that all her donors' and her own blood type all seem to agree with each other.

The 'us, womenfolk' speeches given by Stoker through Mina and Lucy also tend to become annoying after the twentieth time.

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