For a long time, I resisted reading this book. It was unappealing, somehow, and despite recommendations I did not want to give it a chance. ‘Vampires are not really my thing,’ I always thought to myself.
My prejudice was so strong that I practically thought of Dracula as a caricature; the basic premise of the book seemed so overwrought and superficial that I believed it had nothing unique or profound to offer. Much like Frankenstein¸ Dracula suffered in my eyes because of how much it has saturated popular culture. Recently, the word ‘vampire’ has almost become synonymous with examples of bad fiction; fiction defined by shallow romance and cheap thrills. It therefore seemed impossible that the original work was a quality piece of literature.
I was wrong: Dracula is a miraculous novel. Its quality and depth totally surpassed any of my preconceptions. It deserves to be considered a masterpiece and it defied my expectations for three principal reasons.
For one, the writing is simply spectacular. The first ‘wow’ moment came early, when I read the following sentence:
The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of. (42)
“A smile that Judas in hell might be proud of” – God, what an image. The quality never strays either. From the first page to the last, Bram Stoker employs a style both rich in description and precise in meaning. He frequently indulges in metaphor and sometimes lets sentences trail for several lines, but the sound is always conversational and engaging. The writing is brilliant when he depicts scenes of gore:
Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion. (43)
And it is also brilliant when he describes a storm:
A little after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming. (66)
Or a tomb:
The tomb in the day-time, and when wreathed with fresh flowers, had looked grim and gruesome enough; but now, some days afterwards, when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns; when the spider and the beetle had resumed their accustomed dominance; when time-discolored stone, and dust-encrusted mortar, and rusty, dank iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver-plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle, the effect was more miserable and sordid than could have been imagined. (168)
The writing simply pulls you in; it seeps to the bone. Had Stoker been a mediocre stylist, it is doubtful that the unusual aspects of Dracula would have landed with much effect. But because he wraps his story in a memorizing cloud of language, I was willing to let the rest of the book win me over.
The second reason is probably what the book is most famous for: the use of fear and horror. As I said, I assumed the ‘horror’ in this horror-novel would be somewhat cheap; blood and guts sure, maybe a spooky chapel, but nothing particularly powerful. But Stoker uses fear masterfully. The way he gradually spins the terror of Count Dracula over the first fifty pages, for instance, starting with peculiar manners and then nightmarish actions, is a slow-burning mix of horror and wonder.
Throughout the book, I found myself unnerved and unsettled. Little moments would literally make my skin crawl. Some of these moments are scary because they depict the inhuman, the uncanny valley between a charming Romanian noble and a reptilian monster. Like when we first see the Count do something utterly grotesque:
What I saw was the Count’s head coming out from the window…I was at first interested and somewhat amused…But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings…I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with a considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall. (29)
Other times, the fear is more shocking and vicious. This usually happens when our protagonists confront a vampire. As a reader, you are left holding your breath word to word waiting for the deadly standoff to end:
The beautiful color became livid, the eyes seemed to throw out sparks of hell-fire, the brows were wrinkled as though the folds of the flesh were the coils of Medusa’s snakes, and the lovely, blood-stained mouth grew to an open square, as in the passion masks of the Greeks and Japanese. If ever a face meant death – if looks could kill – we saw it at that moment. (181)
And every now and then Stoker is able to channel a deeper, more subtle kind of fear. In these moments the violence is more repressed and ordinary, almost familiar. Most came in the sections of the book set in the asylum. I found this dispassionate, believable terror often left the greatest impression:
I never saw a lunatic in such a paroxysm of rage before…His cries are at times awful, but the silences that follow are more deadly still, for he means murder in every turn and movement. (88)
Taken together, fear raises the stakes in every chapter and heightens the tension unlike anything I’ve ever read - it also makes moments of temporary peace or resolution deeply cathartic. I now better understand that it is important that books make us uncomfortable, from time to time; a book like Dracula allows us to confront gruesome things we hopefully never have to see.
Lastly, the book feels like more than a mere scare fest because Stoker weaves elements of the sublime into the story. He takes time to paint vivid landscapes, using nature and setting as an extension of character and plot. For example, before we even meet the Count we see his country, and we feel that his supreme horror is still small in the shadow of great mountains:
Beyond the green swelling hills of the Mittel Land rose mighty slopes of forest up to the lofty steeps of the Carpathians themselves. Right and left of us they towered, with the afternoon sun falling full upon them and bringing out all the glorious colors of this beautiful range, deep blue and purple in the shadows of the peaks, green and brown where grass and rock mingled, and an endless perspective of jagged rock and pointed crags, till these were themselves lost in the distance, where the snowy peaks rose grandly. (5)
These kinds of spectacular depictions occur fairly often and came as an unexpected surprise for what I presumed would be a nose-to-the-pavement kind of novel. I think Stoker’s choice to start and finish his adventure in such an exalted place was very deliberate; it makes everything feel epic and provides stark contrast to the frantic, fragile efforts of human beings.
There is also an occasional drop of wisdom here and there that would appear out of place in a book about vampires. I don't think it is, though. After all, Stoker uses an unrealistic, almost mythical fictional premise to explore depths of the human experience; again, much like Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. I don’t know how much of the book was explicitly meant to serve as critique or commentary on society. But Stoker filled his novel with some real gems of insight. While such lines will never be the most-referenced from Dracula¸ I wanted to at least highlight my favorite:
How these madmen give themselves away! The real God taketh heed lest a sparrow fall; but the God created from human vanity sees no difference between an eagle and a sparrow. Oh, if men only knew! (86)
So, despite all my misgivings, I walked away from Dracula convinced that it belongs in the Pantheon of 19th century literature. If nothing else, read this book to find out what it is and isn’t. It is not a superficial novel full of guts and clichés. It is a fun, terrifying adventure, an example of the English language at its very best and a vehicle of profound wisdom.
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