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A review by hannahstohelit
Dracula by Bram Stoker
4.0
I think it's possible that I'm giving it half a point or so more than I would if it weren't iconic, but hey, it is iconic! I mean, if nothing else it was nice to see where all the vampire story tropes came from.
In terms of the actual book itself, it was interesting in that it definitely felt somewhat more modern than I was expecting while also simultaneously more old-fashioned- the overall literary style contrasted with, say, Jonathan Harker using a "kodak" to capture what he saw at Dracula's castle reminded me that different eras overlapped! I think my favorite thread of the book, to my surprise, was Lucy Westenra's turning- unlike a lot of Harker's diary entries it moved, and was always entertaining and actually quite moving (...yes some of the innuendo was pretty weird but hey, that's part of the book's dubious charm!). The character of Renfield, though the doctor's entries about him started off tedious if gruesome, ended up much more interesting once Mina and the crew started visiting him and that was a pretty cool approach.
It was also very fun how the epistolary/found-document nature of the book is explained in-text- it is both extremely plausible and explains why we have read some things and not others and have the specific amount of information that we do, very cleverly done. Stoker's job at differentiating people's writing styles from each other is very passable, though a better writer would have used it to draw out the characterization more. That said, if there's one thing the document-based nature of the book makes clear, it's that a major flaw in the plotting is how absolutely obvious it is that Stoker's plotting relies on people keeping secrets from each other for no reason. In books that are just prose, people keep secrets without telling us they're keeping secrets, so those seams in the plot are less visible- here, I was able to identify a number of points where things would have gone much more smoothly, or particular events would never have needed to occur, if Harker or Van Helsing or Mina would have just explained themselves early on.
In terms of characters- Mina was of course a lot of fun (incidentally- the afterword in the volume I read implies that the three vampire women who attempt to seduce/bite Jonathan are seen by him as an alternative to the more frigid Mina, which seems unfair to her), and while Harker doesn't get that much to do on his own after the first quarter of the book, he's still a clearly stand-up guy on the basis of the rest of it, even if the plotting makes him... I was about to say impotent in a metaphorical sense but I actually don't think the book's implication is that it's meant to be metaphorical... let's say ineffective when Dracula comes to attack Mina. Van Helsing is fun even if, as mentioned, he could have saved everyone a lot of confusion if he had just explained what he thought was happening rather than pushing it off- and Lucy's three suitors are all a kind of differentiated blob to me, especially the American who dies (for no reason that I can tell). The madhouse doctor one whose name I'm forgetting at least has his own unique role- the others not so much. Lucy, of course, is written only to be lusted after and shockingly turned.
The thing is that I went into this book knowing that I don't really like creature/monster based fantasy... so it's not really the book's fault that I didn't get a whole lot out of Dracula as a character/force. The world building was interesting, and Jonathan's time in the castle was largely compelling, but at a certain point I just didn't feel the tension during the London scenes. I was expecting to feel it more when they went to Transylvania, but that whole section/the ending felt weirdly meandering and tensionless to me, and ended on what felt like an anticlimax. (Again, why did the cowboy have to die?) In the end, Dracula felt more like an antagonistic force than a creature/person, which was in fairness a decent amount of what he was meant to be in the first place. Reading about his effect on people- the turning of Lucy, the part-turning of Mina, the influence over Renfield, the destruction of that ship- was always compelling, but whenever he himself showed up after that he just felt kind of lame. I don't know why.
Anyway- probably got a bit of a boost for iconicity and not really my thing but in many ways better than I expected.
In terms of the actual book itself, it was interesting in that it definitely felt somewhat more modern than I was expecting while also simultaneously more old-fashioned- the overall literary style contrasted with, say, Jonathan Harker using a "kodak" to capture what he saw at Dracula's castle reminded me that different eras overlapped! I think my favorite thread of the book, to my surprise, was Lucy Westenra's turning- unlike a lot of Harker's diary entries it moved, and was always entertaining and actually quite moving (...yes some of the innuendo was pretty weird but hey, that's part of the book's dubious charm!). The character of Renfield, though the doctor's entries about him started off tedious if gruesome, ended up much more interesting once Mina and the crew started visiting him and that was a pretty cool approach.
It was also very fun how the epistolary/found-document nature of the book is explained in-text- it is both extremely plausible and explains why we have read some things and not others and have the specific amount of information that we do, very cleverly done. Stoker's job at differentiating people's writing styles from each other is very passable, though a better writer would have used it to draw out the characterization more. That said, if there's one thing the document-based nature of the book makes clear, it's that a major flaw in the plotting is how absolutely obvious it is that Stoker's plotting relies on people keeping secrets from each other for no reason. In books that are just prose, people keep secrets without telling us they're keeping secrets, so those seams in the plot are less visible- here, I was able to identify a number of points where things would have gone much more smoothly, or particular events would never have needed to occur, if Harker or Van Helsing or Mina would have just explained themselves early on.
In terms of characters- Mina was of course a lot of fun (incidentally- the afterword in the volume I read implies that the three vampire women who attempt to seduce/bite Jonathan are seen by him as an alternative to the more frigid Mina, which seems unfair to her), and while Harker doesn't get that much to do on his own after the first quarter of the book, he's still a clearly stand-up guy on the basis of the rest of it, even if the plotting makes him... I was about to say impotent in a metaphorical sense but I actually don't think the book's implication is that it's meant to be metaphorical... let's say ineffective when Dracula comes to attack Mina. Van Helsing is fun even if, as mentioned, he could have saved everyone a lot of confusion if he had just explained what he thought was happening rather than pushing it off- and Lucy's three suitors are all a kind of differentiated blob to me, especially the American who dies (for no reason that I can tell). The madhouse doctor one whose name I'm forgetting at least has his own unique role- the others not so much. Lucy, of course, is written only to be lusted after and shockingly turned.
The thing is that I went into this book knowing that I don't really like creature/monster based fantasy... so it's not really the book's fault that I didn't get a whole lot out of Dracula as a character/force. The world building was interesting, and Jonathan's time in the castle was largely compelling, but at a certain point I just didn't feel the tension during the London scenes. I was expecting to feel it more when they went to Transylvania, but that whole section/the ending felt weirdly meandering and tensionless to me, and ended on what felt like an anticlimax. (Again, why did the cowboy have to die?) In the end, Dracula felt more like an antagonistic force than a creature/person, which was in fairness a decent amount of what he was meant to be in the first place. Reading about his effect on people- the turning of Lucy, the part-turning of Mina, the influence over Renfield, the destruction of that ship- was always compelling, but whenever he himself showed up after that he just felt kind of lame. I don't know why.
Anyway- probably got a bit of a boost for iconicity and not really my thing but in many ways better than I expected.