Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

It's been a while since I last read a book that was so undone simply by its own popularity.

Stoker relies so strongly on the air of mystery to carry Dracula's experience, and the very fact that this book has become such a pop culture phenomenon completely undoes that aspect of its strength. Everyone reading this book already knows the answers to the most tantalizing questions Stoker poses: they know Dracula is a vampire, they know his castle is supernatural, they know Lucy's odd ailment is due to having her blood sucked. Surely Stoker knew that such mysteries would create fear and unsettlement in his contemporary audiences, but modern readers—long inundated with the Twilights and the Blades and the Interview with the Vampires and the Castlevanias—are already well-informed about (and enamored with) vampirism in action and horror films of various sorts and will be able to pick up on this stuff nearly immediately. This isn't the first time I've considered such a disarmament of a novel's strengths in plotting by pop culture, and such a thing continues to fascinate me.

The book's titular Count Dracula

Regardless of the fact that this novel has been innately spoiled, I was able to appreciate Stoker's careful crafting of the mystery from a more objective point-of-view, and I respect how he pushed his contemporary readers forward through the plot by asking them what, exactly, was going on here. It's skillfully rendered and impeccably paced; drip-feeding new reveals to the reader. But I couldn't help being robbed of this enjoyment by being easily able to guess what was happening, and so the book subjectively loses this core aspect of its quality and renders much of its investigation as much more dry and rote than it should be. These reveals are robbed of their impact and thus the new discoveries of Van Helsing and co. feel more like busywork than like the new and surprising bits of information they ought to be.

Many readers say that Dracula was their introduction to classic literature in general, and to Victorian literature more specifically, and I think it makes a superb bridge into both for the newer reader. Stoker's prose is surprisingly clean and easily readable, yet still aesthetically pleasing. This kind of novel perhaps represents the bridge from the earlier, stuffier, more labyrinthine prose of high Victorian literature into the more easily consumable, yet still pleasing modernist literature I tend to love so much. I like Dickens as much as the next guy, but he does get a bit long in the tongue at times, which often threatens to undo his propensity for sheer prosaic beauty.

Stoker's prose doesn't quite hit Dickensian highs, but it more than gets the job done for me:

There was a deliberate voluptuousness that was both thrilling and repulsive. And as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal till I could see in the moonlight the moisture. Then lapped the white, sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited. 

 

Never did tombs look so ghastly white. Never did cypress, or yew, or juniper so seem the embodiment of funeral gloom. Never did tree or grass wave or rustle so ominously. Never did bough creak so mysteriously, and never did the far-away howling of dogs send such a woeful presage through the night. 

 

The tomb in the daytime, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discoloured stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. It conveyed irresistibly the idea that life - animal life - was not the only thing that could pass away. 

I've always been a fan of the epistolary structure, though I'm not quite sure why. Perhaps having everything strictly segregated by chapter appeals to the overly orderly, anal being inside of me. While I enjoy this 'found footage' style of novel, I do have to say that Stoker's use of voice between his viewpoint characters left a lot to be desired for me.

Bram Stoker

The novel begins very enjoyably as we're thrust into Jonathan Harker's view. His voice seems appropriately proper and Victorian, and the mystery we're confronted with is relatively fresh, atmospheric, and intriguing. Harker is somewhat relatable as being a stranger-in-a-strange place. Later in the novel, the reader moves on to the other male characters, such as Sewell, Arthur, and Quincy Morris who seem to share an identically proper, buttoned-up, curiously professional characterization to Harker, despite the new characters being from drastically different places in life; Sewell being a physician, Arthur being Lord Goldalming, and Quincey Morris being from Texas. Surely the last of them, at least, would feel remarkably different? The two female characters of Mina and Lucy suffer similar lack of differentiation—the lines and actions of one would suit the other perfectly. And so the characters felt, in general, unremarkable to me and I did not feel myself empathizing with them, since they did not feel unique to me.

The one character safe from this criticism is, of course, Dr. Van Helsing, our resident kooky mad scientist-type. I found myself picturing him as sort of a Christopher Lloyd type from Back to the Future. An eccentric, friendly quack doctor on whose breadth of knowledge regarding the supernatural you can count. His optimistic, hopeful manner was apparent to me and was a nice change of mouthfeel from the deliberately dark and Gothic touches residing throughout the rest of the story. 

I found his dialogue to be particularly brilliant; I enjoy that you can hear just a touch of Van Helsing's Dutch accent in his dialogue:

It is a strange world, a sad world, a world full of miseries, and woes, and troubles. And yet when King Laugh come, he make them all dance to the tune he play. Bleeding hearts, and dry bones of the churchyard, and tears that burn as they fall, all dance together to the music that he make with that smileless mouth of him. Ah, we men and women are like ropes drawn tight with strain that pull us different ways. Then tears come, and like the rain on the ropes, they brace us up, until perhaps the strain become too great, and we break. But King Laugh he come like the sunshine, and he ease off the strain again, and we bear to go on with our labor, what it may be.

This sort of dialogue crafting is brilliantly subtle—only slight errors here and there—but just deliberate enough to affect the voice of the character. I really enjoyed the dialogue throughout Dracula and found it to be one of Stoker's strengths. He handles others, such as the cockney London working class accent, with similar skill. This is not something common to writers of even the greatest horror literature, so I appreciated it here.

Outside of Van Helsing, of course, I found little to differentiate these characters and thus was forced instead to rely instead on the atmosphere and the norms of Victorian London to carry me along, which, most of the time, was more than enough. Stoker is adept at painting a scene, especially those drenched in Gothic horror tropes, and I enjoyed the novel mostly just for that.

So, while I found some of Dracula to be wanting, I did like a lot of it, and I believe its structure and the ease at which its prose can be read makes it a fantastic introduction both to Victorian literature and to classic literature in general. I'll likely recommend it to new readers of the classics quite regularly from here on out, but its flaws keep it from sitting the pantheon next to my very favorite novels.

It's just a shame that so much of Dracula happens to be undone by its own popularity. But it's hard to hold that against it.

⭐⭐⭐