Following up my read-through of Frankenstein, I moved on to one of the other classic literature entries in the monster pantheon – Dracula.
Much like Frankenstein, Dracula is so entrenched in popular culture that I felt apt to know the story before I even really started it. Where Frankenstein’s source material provided some surprise in the strange lens that we’ve applied to it over the years, I found Dracula was far closer to expectations. So much of the canonical vampire lore that you hear is between those pages, and the modern-day conception of the story isn’t far off the mark.
I found the opening sections of the book and a number of other passages throughout to be wonderfully creepy and evocative. The image of the Count climbing the walls of his castle, the howling of wolves in the wilds of Transylvania, all the abandoned and dusty locales where evil hid, it all added up to just the sort of gothic hit I was after.
After the beginning, though, I did find that the pace was a little slow for my taste. In particular, the characters had a tendency towards very looooooong “dialogs” with many verbose repetitions of what they thought and felt. This got ponderous in a hurry, even worse when the character was written in some dialect. As I found in Frankenstein as well, minutia of travel details also took a center stage in many sections. This was perhaps more riveting in the 1800s when folks did not move about as readily, but I didn’t need to know about all the intervening train connections as they got to where they would next confront the Count.
The book does have an interesting epistolary format, between letters and diaries. The effect, though, was mixed. In many of the cases the letter was narrating things in such close detail, the dialog captured in such excruciating word-for-word accuracy, that it became a little hard to buy them as truly being just written materials that happen to form the overall novel.
Glad to have read it, but I’m ready for something next that moves with a little more modern pacing.