"King Vampire": A Review of Dracula

Dracula by Bram Stoker

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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Senseless Violence: A Review of Frankenstein in Baghdad

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The War in Iraq was devastating to the people of that country, but there have been few books written about the war from their perspective, and even fewer of those books have been fictional. This book greatly rectifies that by riffing on one of the greatest books in the Western canon and using it as a vehicle to meditate on the senseless violence of the civil war that gripped the country in the mid-2000s.

The book starts not long after the the invasion of Iraq, around 2005 or so, and Baghdad is just beginning to sink into the sectarian violence that will grip it for several years. In the midst of this, an eccentric homeless man collects the body parts of different bombing victims and puts them together. Suddenly, the body comes to life, goes on a killing spree, and becomes the obsession of a local reporter, the general of a rogue Iraqi division, and the residents of the local district the monster inhabits.

If this all sounds exciting, just know, going into this book, it is not a super exciting book. While there are moments of high drama, this is not exactly some kind of horror-suspense novel. Rather, as I said above, this book is more of a meditation on the senseless violence that the invasion unleashed. The monster itself is more of a metaphor, though he does have a great chapter that he narrates in the middle of the book.

Honestly, it was not the book I was expecting when I picked it up, but that does not mean that it is a bad book. Indeed, this is a book that I am going to have to revisit in the near future as my stuttered reading of it probably did not lend itself to the best reading experience. All I can say is that, after reading this book, I am still fascinated by its premise and I feel like I have to read it again in the near future.

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It Lives!: A Review of Frankenstein

Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Frankenstein was an instant classic when published in 1818 and still holds a hallowed place in world literature. You can't have a serious discussion about scientific advancement in any field today without someone asking, "Are we making a Frankenstein's monster?" It's taken me awhile to get to this book myself, but after finally reading it, I must say that it lives up to the hype.

The novel, which follows the life of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he creates, is good. The basic plot, which you already know, is gripping and Mary Shelley really knew how to write a good sentence. Unlike many other books of 19th century literature, there isn't a whole lot of wasted space and this book is just as quick a read today as any other book of contemporary literature. Indeed, this may be one of the most readable books of classic literature you are likely to find and, I dare say, will still be readable 100 years from now.

That is not to say that this book is completely free of the 19th century tropes that have bogged down other classic literature. There is still the obligatory retelling of the main character's life from their birth to their very death, like with Jean Valjean in Les Misérables, and there is a lot of exposition, particularly when the monster begins to relate his own story. While the language is still very readable, it is still very flowery, with the same long-winded flourishes that you will find in other classic 19th century literature. In spite of that, this is still an incredibly tight story, mostly because of the overall story's shortness. I could imagine this book getting tedious were it 100 or 200 pages longer.

Frankenstein has survived and thrived in our cultural landscape not just because of the thematic elements that still haunt contemporary debates about nature, humanity, and science, but also because it is a darn good book. This is a book that will appeal to science fiction and horror fans, but is also a great seating point for classic literature.

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