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Went into this not really knowing what to expect, and overall I came out of it pretty impressed! The story is actually pretty creepy for a 19th century horror novel (The description of Mina seeing Dracula for the first time was honestly one of the creepiest things I’ve read in a book), and I thought the “compilation of journals” style was pretty unique and interesting - almost like a book version of the found-footage genre of horror movies.
It’s tough to read this without bringing into it all the baggage of vampires and Dracula that we have now. There’s some things here that seem super obvious to us but aren’t to the characters, while at other times the version of Dracula here is in overt conflict with the version that has been built-up over the past century in pop-culture. But attempting to take this on its face, Bram Stoker was essentially creating the entire genre of vampires as we know them out of thin air.
There were some really cool themes here, like the struggle between science and superstition at the dawn of the 20th century - which is manifested beautifully in the character of Van Helsing (someone who himself is at the intersection of these) and the latter of which Seward (who encapsulates the more “modern” scientific processes of the time) has a hard time coming to terms with. Sexuality is another big theme - many of Dracula’s actions are easily read as innuendo, and pretty overtly homosexual innuendo at that (Stoker himself was rumored to be gay).
Women in this book are… interesting. On one hand, there’s some pretty overt sexist overtones - Lucy (and at times Mina) playing the damsel in distress role, constantly referring to the men as “strong” and “brave”, the men seeking to protect the women from harm by excluding them, etc. On the other hand, Mina does play an integral role in saving the day and it was pretty clearly a terrible mistake by the men to exclude her when they did. Stoker clearly thinks highly of female intellect as evidenced by Mina, but to what extent he is using the sexism of the male characters to highlight feminist issues vs falling back on damsel in distress tropes is debatable. I tend to think that for a 19th century novel written by a man, it does a pretty good job, but obviously many moments here will be strange to a modern reader.
To conclude, I really enjoyed the style and themes in this book, and loved the frame of a compilation of documents. The pacing was a little strange at times, but I’m not sure how I would have changed it - perhaps moving the Lucy stuff along a bit faster, but I did quite enjoy the slow building feeling of doom that it brought on. In the end, this book impressed me greatly, and I was genuinely creeped out for good chunks of this book - something I did not expect.
8.4/10
It’s tough to read this without bringing into it all the baggage of vampires and Dracula that we have now. There’s some things here that seem super obvious to us but aren’t to the characters, while at other times the version of Dracula here is in overt conflict with the version that has been built-up over the past century in pop-culture. But attempting to take this on its face, Bram Stoker was essentially creating the entire genre of vampires as we know them out of thin air.
There were some really cool themes here, like the struggle between science and superstition at the dawn of the 20th century - which is manifested beautifully in the character of Van Helsing (someone who himself is at the intersection of these) and the latter of which Seward (who encapsulates the more “modern” scientific processes of the time) has a hard time coming to terms with. Sexuality is another big theme - many of Dracula’s actions are easily read as innuendo, and pretty overtly homosexual innuendo at that (Stoker himself was rumored to be gay).
Women in this book are… interesting. On one hand, there’s some pretty overt sexist overtones - Lucy (and at times Mina) playing the damsel in distress role, constantly referring to the men as “strong” and “brave”, the men seeking to protect the women from harm by excluding them, etc. On the other hand, Mina does play an integral role in saving the day and it was pretty clearly a terrible mistake by the men to exclude her when they did. Stoker clearly thinks highly of female intellect as evidenced by Mina, but to what extent he is using the sexism of the male characters to highlight feminist issues vs falling back on damsel in distress tropes is debatable. I tend to think that for a 19th century novel written by a man, it does a pretty good job, but obviously many moments here will be strange to a modern reader.
To conclude, I really enjoyed the style and themes in this book, and loved the frame of a compilation of documents. The pacing was a little strange at times, but I’m not sure how I would have changed it - perhaps moving the Lucy stuff along a bit faster, but I did quite enjoy the slow building feeling of doom that it brought on. In the end, this book impressed me greatly, and I was genuinely creeped out for good chunks of this book - something I did not expect.
8.4/10