Book Review: Dracula by Bram Stoker

Book #168 of 2022:

Dracula by Bram Stoker

First published in 1897, this gothic horror novel remains an influential classic. Its characters like Van Helsing and the bloodsucking Count himself are now household names, and so many of our cultural ideas about vampires that subsequent stories have either reiterated or consciously pushed back against can trace their origins to here, if not further to the then-obscure myths that author Bram Stoker was drawing upon. Yet it’s a production all its own despite over a century of imitators and successors, with plenty of distinctive elements that are well worth revisiting. (A personal favorite of mine: the writer tends to set his most pulse-pounding adventure sequences in the daylight, with his mortal protagonists racing the setting sun to accomplish their current goal while their enemy is at his weakest, knowing that he will rise and be upon them as soon as darkness falls. So many later plots involving the undead, for whatever reason, place them as active adversaries in more of a survive-the-night mode instead.)

It’s a Victorian title through and through, which means it has some interesting philosophical reflections on society around all the action and the scares, but also that it’s unfortunately and sometimes hilariously dated in its impressions of science and of gender. There’s likewise no escaping how racist, antisemitic, and generally xenophobic this depiction of Dracula is, as a hook-nosed hairy foreigner eating babies and invading the Christian nation of England to prey on the purity of its white women. But overall it’s a fun throwback read, with the epistolary format allowing for a lively rotating cast to deliver the various segments of its narrative.

This year, I reread the novel by means of the ‘Dracula Daily‘ listserv, which sends out an email digest reproducing all the letters, newspaper articles, journal entries, and so on that make up this tale on the same date that they’re marked on the page. So since the entirety of Dracula unfolds between May 3rd and November 6th of one calendar year (plus a brief ‘seven years later’ epilogue sent out today), I’ve spent the past six months following along with these fictional events essentially as everything happened. I wouldn’t do this every year — I don’t like Stoker’s Dracula quite enough for an annual reread — but it was a neat way to stay in the moment alongside the heroes, not to mention encourage a closer reading and engage with a community on social media all consuming the text at the same pace. If you missed out on this year’s run, I highly recommend signing up for the next one, or even just parceling out the book that way sometime yourself.

[Content warning for ableism, rape, and gore.]

★★★★☆

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