Dracula

Hardcover, 512 pages

Published April 20, 2011 by Penguin Classics.

ISBN:
978-0-14-119688-6
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4 stars (2 reviews)

During a business visit to Count Dracula's castle in Transylvania, a young English solicitor finds himself at the center of a series of horrifying incidents. Jonathan Harker is attacked by three phantom women, observes the Count's transformation from human to bat form, and discovers puncture wounds on his own neck that seem to have been made by teeth. Harker returns home upon his escape from Dracula's grim fortress, but a friend's strange malady — involving sleepwalking, inexplicable blood loss, and mysterious throat wounds — initiates a frantic vampire hunt. The popularity of Bram Stoker's 1897 horror romance is as deathless as any vampire. Its supernatural appeal has spawned a host of film and stage adaptations, and more than a century after its initial publication, it continues to hold readers spellbound.

1 edition

Wonderfully evocative descriptions

4 stars

Having ignored my own recent advice after reading Princess Casamassima by Henry James to 'beware verbose Victorians', I finally picked up Dracula this week. This is my third book for the 2016 TBR Pile Reading Challenge.

I've had a paperback copy of Dracula by Bram Stoker awaiting reading since we visited Whitby Abbey last year. The ruins were so creepy, even on a sunny day, and I loved remembering our visit and being able to envisage the relevant scenes as I read. I did already vaguely know the plot, but don't think I have ever read this book before, not even in a child's classics version. Thinking about it, perhaps there isn't one? For what essentially is a pretty short story, this is a long book. However, once I got into the convoluted style, I found that there was a swift enough pace to keep me interested. It is very …

Compelling, atmospheric, and very very intensely flawed

3 stars

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 …