Dracula: Bram Stoker

[Jason_Taverner]

I think your right but I enjoyed it thinking what people in the victorian era would feel to read something like this I bet it freaked them out and the difference between the count and van helsing and his friends. The count was pure evil instead of a romantic hollywood version.

[steve12553]

Originally Posted by Jason_Taverner

I think your right but I enjoyed it thinking what people in the victorian era would feel to read something like this I bet it freaked them out and the difference between the count and van helsing and his friends. The count was pure evil instead of a romantic hollywood version.

Written when it was I think he was obliged to keep the Romance (read sexuality) at a very suble level not just by society as a whole but by his own upbringing.

[KSeriphyn]

The man was ahead of his time. It's a crappy piece of work I agree. The idea was so controversial back then, it got tongues wagging and other writers creating far better vampire stories.

Stephen King's Salem's Lot still gives me shivers.

xx

KS

[Jackols]

Originally Posted by I, Brian

It is possibly heresy to state so, but I found Bram Stoker's Dracula to be a dull and lifeless work.

The first few chapters while Jonathan Harker is trapped in Dracula's castle is very good - but that part of the story quickly ends.

And then the rest of the book is seemingly Van Helsing (not the Hugh Jackman version!!) giving people blood transfusions.

The ending is extremely rushed as well. The characters assemble in Transylvania, and within 2 pages Dracula is suddenly killed.

The end. Fin.

As a piece of writing influential on its time, it certainly deserves an honour. But let's not elevate second-rate Victorian populist literature too much, please.

OR - am I quite wrong?

sorry!! but i find that quite wrong!!......i so enjoyed this book, my copy is really tattered now but havent read it for ages but i really enjoyed it, the way it unfolds and the whole reading of it!!

[Randolph]

I completely agree that Jon Harker's Diary at the beginning of the book is much better than the rest. I think that segment alone makes the book worth reading. Although it's been quite a while since I read it, I seem to remember the story getting poorer and poorer after he attempted to escape the castle, right up to the incredibly disappointing anti-climax. I also agree that it isn't really a classic of the genre, particularly if it's compared to, say, Frankenstein.

[ravenus]

Oh I found several other brilliant parts to the book:

The sinking, unholy resurrection and final staking of Lucy Westerna

The Crashing of the Demeter.

Renfield in the Asylum.

I don't consider the end an anti-climax at all. After spending reams on showing how powerful and omniscient Dracula is, it'd have been silly to say, show him slavering about and then leaping right into a stake just to put more brute action in the end.

Compared to that, Frankenstein is a more hobbling narrative that unevenly blends philosophical debate with action pieces. Dracula, true, succumbs in several parts to overwrought melodrama and Van Helsing's hlarious accent (though if you read Stephen King's terrific review of Frankenstein in Danse Macabre, you will find that Shelley's book is no way short of contrived moments and unintentional hilarity), but it is for me a far more entertaining enterprise than Mary Shelley's book.

[Riselka]

Dracula is still one of my favourite novels, but I do have to agree with some of the points being made here about it being a bit slow, and melodramatic at times.

I don't know about the legality of using the "Dracula" name, and some of the other characters and circumstances in the novel, but I'd be up to reading a new novel that was a sort of "Dracula Redux" version of the story.

Any of the site authors up to the challenge?

[ravenus]

Well you would be able to release an abridged version of the story since it is out of copyright anyway. But you would likely have to release it for free. Me, I skip through the parts I don't like

[Sibeling]

I read it for the first time when I was about 14 and I thought it was very original to make a book out of letters and diaries.

The first part in the Dracula castle was interesting, but then the action got a bit slow. However, I liked the part about the asylum and blood transfusions. Particularly the blood transfusions - all the medical things really frighten me, so it created the proper effect of a horror book

At least it was better than Frankenstein - that one was so boring I couldn't read more than the first chapter

[Flemcodogmusic]

I really enjoyed Dracula, but found it very hard to get Christopher Lee's face out of my head! I think the problem - with the films being so well known - is that it's now impossible for anyone to come to the book without a preconceived idea of it ...

[ravenus]

But then the book itself has very strong and detailed imagery and I don't think it's all that hard to get the films out of your head once you're into Stoker's text.

[clovis-man]

Stoker's book was written well over 100 years ago. The pacing of anything written in such a bygone literary era can often seem slow. Having said that, I found it to flow much better than its age would have indicated.

I remember saying to to my daughter-in-law after she and my son had gone to see the film when it was brand new that I couldn't imagine hollywood having the movie end with Dracula being killed with a bowie knife like Stoker had. She just looked at me and smiled. When I finally saw it, I was glad to see that many other elements of the novel had been retained as well.

But I was quite dismayed to find that Dracula had been turned into a "love story". Sorry, I just can't be terrified by a creature who spends most of his time mooning over Winona Ryder.

[brsrkrkomdy]

JD, I have to disagree with you on The Squaw and The Judge's House. They're the opposite of you claimed they were. I've read those two several times before. Same with Dracula's Guest. I'm not gonna comment on the novel, Dracula, cuz I haven't read that one yet. However, I did read Lair Of the White Worm. It's not that bad a novel. Nor was it exactly his best work though. It is simply a very strange book to read which had very little to do with the movie of the same name. (It's a campy fun movie from Ken Russell.)

[j. d. worthington]

Originally Posted by brsrkrkomdy

JD, I have to disagree with you on The Squaw and The Judge's House. They're the opposite of you claimed they were. I've read those two several times before. Same with Dracula's Guest.

That's quite interesting. I can almost see it with "The Judge's House", as there are moments when it does achieve a certain tensity of atmosphere... but having very recently reread "The Squaw", I stand by my assessment. It's an horrific situation, no question, but to me it comes off as contrived rather than having any sort of genuine artistry, and the writing itself varies between being extremely flat and prosaic to overheated and overcolored... while maintaining at all times a certain hackneyed journalistic feel very much like the penny dreadfuls. Actually, I found a comic adaptation of it I read when young to be much more powerful as far as atmosphere, because of the fine use of chiaroscuro. But Stoker's actual writing style overall is often his weakest point, IMO... Dracula being something of an exception. As for "Dracula's Guest"... as that was a chapter of the novel which was excerpted from earlier editions, it's not surprising that it has something of the same eeriness as the novel itself, and I think it's a pity it wasn't left where it belonged....

Lair of the White Worm, on the other hand -- again, a very good idea, but his often crude, almost always uneven prose simply robs it of most of its potential as it stands... the idea remains a powerful one, but the execution is, frankly, more than disappointing.

[brsrkrkomdy]

Actually Dracula's Guest was set in the different time zone than the one at the beginning with Jonathan Harker on his way to Dracula's castle. (I know cuz I peeked at the beginning of the novel.)