I read this as part of Dracula and Other Horror Stories, published by Barnes & Noble in 2013.  Turns out, I also have a complete version with a few illustrations by Edward Gorey, so I’m using the cover image from that. (Edit: I finished reading this collection, and other than a couple short stories, really disliked it, which is why I won’t be writing any more reviews from it. My general ambivalence with the overall collection of Stoker’s work was brought much lower by Lair of the White Worm aka Garden of Evil, which is one of the most hateful and racist books I’ve ever read. It’s even worse than Live and Let Die, which is pretty bad.)

I hadn’t read this since maybe high school or even possibly junior high.  More than thirty years, whatever the case.  My very, very vague memory was of having mixed feelings about the novel, and having a hard time getting through it.  I’m much more versed in the real life history of the time and in the literature than I was then, so I figured maybe I should give it another go.  Plus, I enjoyed reading Carmilla recently, and was in the mood for more Gothic Horror.

There is no denying that Bram Stoker had a huge influence on authors, filmmakers, and pop culture generally, with this book.  However, I’m just going to throw this out there.  Dracula isn’t actually that good a book.  Or, more accurately, there’s a good book hiding in Dracula, but you’ve got to dig for it.  If I had my way, I’d send it to an experienced and aggressive editor.  I’m not even exaggerating when I say I think close to half of the book is bloat and fluff that should be trimmed.

Stoker does write some great sentences and describes some wonderful and evocative scenes.  However, he also repeats himself frequently, drags some scenes on far, far longer than they need to be, and has some sequences that play out over chapters when they could have been wrapped up in a couple pages.  When you’re twenty pages past the point where you last felt tension, and that conflict still hasn’t been resolved, there’s a problem.  Don’t even get me started on how much word-count is taken up with characters singing the lavish praises of other characters again and again.  There are probably too many characters, evidenced by more than one of them having no discernible personality, to the point where I was unable to remember their names.  And more than one had little to no part in the overall plot.  And that’s not even mentioning that there are two characters named Jonathan.

Of course, many have written extensively about this book.  There have been works about its sexuality, which I found oddly chaste and stuffy, especially after having recently read Carmilla, which is very much not those things.  Dracula ends up, in that way, seeming more like the Victorian novel of my imagination than some others that I’ve read.  Not that my knowledge of the era’s literature is extensive.  It is not.  Other works have focused on various social, xenophobic, and likely anti-Semetic elements in the book.  I don’t think that’s much of a reach.  There’s very much a “foreigners are invading and they want our women” theme.  It is, however, oddly pro-American.  I’m not used to that sort of sentiment from the UK today, much less in the 1800s.

All that negative aside, there is a compelling story here.  Much of the sequence with Jonathan Harker traveling to and dealing with the count is quite good, even if Harker comes off as a somewhat pathetic sap.  I really do like the “epistolary novel” format.  Reading this assembly of letters, journal entries, and newspaper articles gives it a very cool vibe.  I’m not sure Stoker always does such a great job of capturing the various characters’ “voice” in their writing, however.  Mina is perhaps a bit less dreamy than Lucy, at least early on.  But she’s not much different from Harker.  The other Jonathan, Dr. Seward is perhaps slightly more resolute, but still seems like he’s going to collapse on the fainting couch.

I was surprised to see how much of the various forms of vampire lore Stoker crammed into this single book.  With a lot of movies, they’ll tend to focus on one or two aspects of vampires.  Stake through the heart, don’t’ like garlic.  Or can’t cross running water, can turn into a bat.  In this book, though, the Count has it all.  Controlling animals, entrancing people from afar, turning to mist, needing to sleep in soil from his home, creating an army of undead, etc.  They even imply that it isn’t the symbol (Crucifix or what have you), but the personal power of belief that holds him at bay.

On the one hand, I think there are some great individual parts in this book.  For those, I think it’s worth reading.  On the other hand, it’s entirely too long, and part of me thinks it would be better to read an abridged version.  I just worry an abridged version would trim out some of those great bits.  So, I sort of get why it’s a classic, even though I think it may have as much to do with the success of film adaptations like Nosferatu (1922) and Dracula (1931) than with the book itself.  To be honest, I preferred Carmilla, which was not only considerably shorter, but also considerably more visceral and compelling.  It felt less like a BBC drawing room drama from the mid-1970s.

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