Tuesday, April 21, 2020

"King Vampire": A Review of Dracula

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Though vampires, the legendary blood-sucking monsters, have been around in our stories and mythology for a long time. However, Dracula by Bram Stoker is where vampires truly entered the human imagination and have never really left, though zombie stories have recently been gaining greater popularity. Though I read and adored The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which is heavily influenced by Dracula, I had never gotten around to reading it until now and I was not disappointed at all.

Dracula is still a great novel to read. The pace, the tension, the mystery, and the eye brow-raising sexual undertones are worthy of any current thriller or horror novel. I was also surprised at how violent this book was. I guess I should not have been surprised considering the main villain is a monster that sucks the blood of its victims, but given the time it was published, I guess I was expecting something a bit more clean in its presentations of violence. Instead, this book features a good amount of flowing blood that would seem pretty standard in an Anne Rice novel. And I was hooked by the mystery and the chase this book devolves into as the main characters race to bring an end to Count Dracula's evil reign before it is too late.

This is not a perfect book though. Some of the conventions of a typical Victorian novel are still here and have still not aged very well. In particular, Mr. Stoker's implementation of lengthy, flowery dialogue and the excessive emotionalism began to grate on me after a while. So many of the male characters would cry at any one point that it started to become a little maudlin. Mr. Stoker also has a tendency to use dialogue rather than action to move the story along. When they are chasing Dracula in the third act, the dialogue read more like a committee than anything real. But, while all of this was annoying, it did not fully detract from my enjoyment of the novel.

Whether you are interested in vampires or not, this is a thrilling novel that still holds up over a 120+ years later. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in thrillers and/or horror novels.

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