Book Report: Dracula by Bram Stoker

Dracula: Torgo disapproves

It's not terrible, but I have a whole panoply of contentions with this book.

First off, it never would have gotten out of a fiction workshop. That's not to say workshops should have any merit as to judging literature. In fact, they often stifle creativity. But Stoker could have benefited from a lesson in how to structure and pace a novel.

It begins like a good horror story should, with Jonathan Harker going to Dracula's castle. The villain is introduced with foreboding, then we get the real thing, mysterious but not a monster at first. Harker quickly realizes what Dracula is, and until Act 1 ends, it's a gripping story.

Then it's all downhill. Act 2 lasts an eternity. I took issue with the fact that none of the people could figure out that the mysteriously ill woman with two puncture marks on her neck that don't heal who was found hanging out in a graveyard at night with a mysterious, red-eyed man in black, and needs constant blood transfusions, and has a big bat flapping at her window might, just might, have been bitten by a vampire. And that's probably unfair. They couldn't know about vampires b/c they're in the original book (though it is an old myth).

But they spend way too much time sitting around doing nothing. And if that's not bad enough, when things finally are about to get moving, they spend a chapter compiling notes (the book is all told in journal entries), reading them, talking about reading them, and the writing more and reading them. If this is the birth of metafiction, I wish it would go away.

Meanwhile, Dracula himself seems to be in a much more interesting novel and that's why he doesn't appear anymore in this one.

Honestly, he spends the final act in a box on a boat, not doing anything, then they kill him in what certainly must be the world's most anti-climactic ending.

I was surprised to find what the novel of Frankenstein was like, because it's not at all what I expected. The plot is much more interesting than the stock movies make it out to be. Dracula, too, is surprising, but in a more infuriating way.