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Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

Dracula by Bram Stoker, Sparknotes

18 reviews

dark mysterious tense medium-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

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dark emotional mysterious sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Character
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: N/A
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

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adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Yes
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

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challenging dark mysterious tense slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: No
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

 2.5 ⭐ CW: suicide, blood drinking (obviously)

Dracula by Bram Stoker was a buddy read with a friend. This was...not an enjoyable read. I understand it is a classic and written in a time where long winded descriptions were expected, but damn it made hard to get through.

Dracula is told in a series of letters and personal journal entries with news articles and telegrams interspersed between. We follow Jonathan Harker, a solicitor who has come to Castle Dracula to help Dracula in purchasing a property in London. Jonathon experiences some weird stuff that ends up making him ill.

We also follow Mina, fiancee of Jonathon, worrying over her friend Lucy, who has begun sleep walking and becoming pale and sickly for seemingly no reason. After Lucy's death, all of her suitors come together with Mina and Jonathan to figure out what is going on and to stop the Count.

Mina deserves way more credit than she gets in this book. Mina is clever and is solely responsible for rallying the men to her cause and is the one to put together all the information in order to come to the conclusion of vampires. Dracula's death (spoiler alert lol) was very anticlimactic. Stoker does a lot of telling instead of showing.

We see themes on superstition and how important it is to consider the grain of truth within as well as the ever present theme of humans being afraid of their souls becoming damned.

I skimmed most of this book, since most of the information could have been cut back. Glad to have read it, even more glad to be done with it. 

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adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious medium-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

This book has everything! A count with a funny accent who lives in an spooky old castle, a girl and her three suitors who coincidentally all have the same bloodtype (and one of them is a cowboy), a madman who regulary breaks out of the asylum, a woman who‘s not only smarter than every other character in this book, but also has the sweetest marriage ever and a dutch professor who‘s a part time vampire hunter. And as a bonus you get atmospheric descriptions of the scenery and various natural events.
It’s funny, only a little creepy and definitely worth a read!

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adventurous dark hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: A mix
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: Yes
Diverse cast of characters: No
Flaws of characters a main focus: No

If Dracula had ended after chapter four, I might have given it a full five stars. The first fifty-odd pages are undoubtedly the best part of the book. Jonathan Harker is trapped in Dracula’s castle, and slowly realising that he is trapped. The atmosphere is tense and eerie. Both Harker and Dracula are interesting and well-developed characters, and the interactions between them are great.

I want to talk for a moment about Count Dracula specifically. In the first four chapters he is depicted as (seemingly) kind, hospitable, careful, and emotionally intelligent, but there’s something sinister about him too. There’s also quite a bit of queer subtext. Dracula is a complicated and sympathetic character at this point, but later his characterisation changes drastically and he ends up being reduced to a cartoonish villain with very little depth. He also becomes a much less prominent part of the narrative – he’s not entirely absent, but he takes on more of a peripheral role. I wish we’d seen more of him. (Interestingly, this is the exact reverse of my view regarding Frankenstein’s monster)

Of course, I must address the elephant in the room – the bigotry. Dracula is a character crafted from several antisemitic tropes. His hooked nose is emphasised many times, and there are parallels between his vampirism (specifically his preying on children) and blood libel. Something else that stands out when viewing the character through this lens is the way he is presented as both an immensely powerful mastermind and a weakling with a “child-brain” – proto-fascist rhetoric, perhaps? The book as a whole is riddled with xenophobia, racism, ableism, and sexism. In many ways it’s a product of its time. Its age doesn’t excuse these problematic elements, but it does offer some context at least.

I was led to believe that Dracula is slow-paced but for a gothic horror story it’s actually very quick. It’s relatively well-written, and the epistolary format is executed well. Excellent build-up to an anticlimactic ending. There’s so much more I could say about the characters and the story (both praise and criticism) but I think I’ll wrap things up here.

Overall I did enjoy Dracula and I’m glad I finally sat down and read it. It’s certainly not without its flaws but I think it’s worth reading if you haven’t already.

“The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me, with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.” 

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