By Bram Stoker

Happy Halloween!  For the darkest of all seasons, will be looking at the original book, the Universal Dracula movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and finally the 2020 BBC mini-series.

 I came to this book when I was in university. The class I was taking was Textual Intervention Gothic. This was a creative writing class focused on reworking existing works of fiction. A good example of this would be Sherlock. In this class, the required reading was Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turning of the Screw and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Out of all these books, the only ones that I had never read before were Dracula and The Turning of the Screw.

“First published in 1897, Dracula is a Gothic horror novel written by seminal Irish writer Bram Stoker.

Jonathan Harker is a newly-qualified solicitor from England who travels to the Carpathian Mountains on the border of Transylvania, Bukovina, and Moldavia to oversee the sale of a castle. The current owner of the property is one Count Dracula, whom Harker initially perceives as gracious and welcoming, but whom he soon realises has diabolical plans of a preternatural nature.

Abraham “Bram” Stoker (1847-1912) was an Irish author most famous for writing this novel, as well as the influence it has had upon the horror and vampire genre in print and film.”

Here is my spoiler-free review. This is one of those books where everyone knows the characters, but may have never read the book. This book will probably have some surprises, both because of the style in which the book is written, but also because of certain things that were added in later adaptations. Also, if this review makes you want to read the book, here is a little trick: most books that are in the public domain can be found in both podcast form and on YouTube. Have fun.

For this book, I have three thoughts I would like to talk about.

Firstly, the science in this book dates it more than anything else in a very specific way. By this, I mean when Dracula is feeding on Lucy, she gets four different blood donations from four different people. Also from the text, it seems that they are using drugs to knock Lucy out and then they transfer the blood from person to person. This shows that Mr. Stoker has heard of blood donations, but the idea of blood typing wasn’t well-known. This is a great example of an author trying to add science to the fantastical idea of monster hunting, but at the same time, Mr. Stocker’s lack of knowledge can make modern readers feel disconnected from the book.

Secondly, the writing style: in the spoiler-free review, I said that this book might be confusing. This is because the entire book is a collection of diary entries, letters and newspapers. This is fascinating because there are not as many books nowadays that are like this, so when you pick up Dracula for the first time, you may be surprised that the first chapter is Johnathon Harker’s travel diary. Another thing that I find interesting about this book is that it is a slow burn that has lost its suspense. Everyone knows now that Dracula is a vampire and what comes from this. But the readers of the time would not.

Thirdly, there are two times in this book where, on a second reading, you can see parts where our heroes should have done something different. Firstly, Renfield begs to be allowed to leave the asylum, but he gets turned down. We later learn that Dracula was tricking Renfield into inviting him in. We can only wonder what would have changed if Doctor Seward had listened to him. Instead, because he assumes Renfield is just having one of his fits, the good doctor almost dooms another lovely young lady.

Secondly, the men decided that Mina should be kept out of things so she would not be burdened by the knowledge of the danger. This is ignoring the fact that many of them have just been talking about how smart and wonderful she is. The problem with this idea is that Dracula is targeting Mina, and because she has no knowledge about any of this, it means that she does not recognize the signs of being fed on before it is almost too late.

Thank you for joining me for the gothic horror story. I would be curious to see how many people have read the book before, and until next time.

Happy reading to all, and to all a good night.