I can’t actually write a review of Dracula, that’d be sacrilegious so I’m just going to tell you why I had to read it now and then ramble on about it a bit.
Last year I was very excited to win a competition on Twitter. The prize was Dracula The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker. Yes, Dacre is a descendent of Bram, in fact, he’s a great nephew and this book is the sequel. It’s a bit silly to read the sequel without having read the original so when DD borrowed Dracula from the library I took the opportunity of reading it also.
I suspect I’ve read it before as some parts of it were rather familiar but the bulk of it wasn’t. I do recall reading a short story with some similarities fairly recently and it’d be nice to be able to remember the name of this story so I could tell you but I generally don’t pay much attention to the names of short stories. The similarity was in the location of the house and also in dealing with a dead person so they would stop haunting the family, it also felt very much like Dracula in the writing style.
There were several bits that really annoyed me about Dracula. The leading characters were all sweetness and light. Nothing was too hard for them and they were always absolutely perfectly behaved in thought, word and deed. I don’t mind the odd character like that but it’s impossible for everyone to be like that. I found the focus on the protection provided by the Cross to be rather annoying, I do understand that Christianity was the most prominent religion at the time of writing and that’s why that particular symbol was used but as a non-Christian I find it annoying…it also annoys me in Buffy. I did like Dracula’s castle, though.
Dracula in the book is rather different to modern perceptions of vampires. Just look at Buffy, for example. Vampires in Buffy can’t go out in daylight and can’t change their shape. Also, in Buffy, the vampires kill immediately with the first bite while Dracula takes his time to kill over several days, sucking a little blood at a time and stretching tension just so much without actually breaking it.
At this point I could do something really silly and mention George Hamilton in Love at First Bite, a movie screened in 1979 which really has very little similarity to Stoker’s Dracula but is fun and George Hamilton was very good looking (still is, to be honest). We were discussing this the other night over dinner and someone suggested that Bram Stoker had not done enough research, completely missing out Buffy, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Twilight.
I’m going to stop at this point before I get myself into too much trouble.
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