el dang reviewed Dracula by Bram Stoker
Compelling, atmospheric, and very very intensely flawed
3 étoiles
First of all: I read this in draculadaily.substack.com/about form. I highly recommend this approach because the pacing in real time adds a lot of tension. But it does also mean that I didn't read it in exactly the order that the author put the text in.
In some ways this is a great book. There's a reason why Stoker's vision of the vampire has become so dominant in pop culture. And the format--a series of letters and journal entries--works very well, even if sometimes one has to suspend disbelief about how the characters found time to write thousands of words on the most action-packed days.
But it's also deeply flawed in ways that reflect very poorly on the author. It's super racist and very sexist--even by the low standards of the era it was written in--and Stoker insisted on writing various accents even though he was terrible at that, and …
First of all: I read this in draculadaily.substack.com/about form. I highly recommend this approach because the pacing in real time adds a lot of tension. But it does also mean that I didn't read it in exactly the order that the author put the text in.
In some ways this is a great book. There's a reason why Stoker's vision of the vampire has become so dominant in pop culture. And the format--a series of letters and journal entries--works very well, even if sometimes one has to suspend disbelief about how the characters found time to write thousands of words on the most action-packed days.
But it's also deeply flawed in ways that reflect very poorly on the author. It's super racist and very sexist--even by the low standards of the era it was written in--and Stoker insisted on writing various accents even though he was terrible at that, and apparently some of the best place-description passages were essentially plagiarised from travel guides. And at times I really struggled with how intensely the Dracula character maps on to antisemitic tropes of the time: the strange outsider from Somewhere East who drinks the blood of innocent Christians and must not only be defeated but hunted down wherever he flees to.
I am glad I read this, but I'll be happy to never read another page by Bram Stoker again.