Dracula

I kind of had a love/like/WTF relationship with this book. It's so darn clever and yet ridiculous at the same time. The characters are exaggerations and silly. And the dialogue, Gah!

On top of that, the "rules" for this whole vampirism thing make no sense at all, and there are no explanations for how they figured out those rules. The good doctor just knows from some dude who told him and assumed it all to be true, no matter how far fetched.

But still, Dracula is an enjoyable romp that explores some interesting themes that I'm unsure the author knew were even there.

This Everyman Library edition (they are always the best editions) includes an introduction by Joan Acocella who concludes with "Dracula is like the work of other nineteenth-century writers. You can complain that their novels are loose, baggy monsters, that their poems are crazy and unfinished. Still, you gasp at what they're saying: the truth." I think I can agree with that.

Just a list of thoughts I had as I thought them:

• Very enjoyable, fast read.
• A little bit too much of all the characters basically falling in love with each other on first meeting and becoming best friends. A lot of “oh won’t you be my best friend for life now since we’ve been through this together?”
• Characters are a little dumb in places where they really shouldn’t be. They literally just got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a bat, and then Quincy sees the bats sitting outside the windows staring at them and they don’t think anything more of it when it flies away.
• Same with how they got done talking about how Dracula can turn into a mist and a control the fog, and Mina goes up to her room and sees the fog coming at her and sees them mist in her room, and everybody sees her getting paler and paler, and they don’t think anything of it.
• Surprisingly scary in places, and even more surprisingly gorey. Not what I expected from a book of the time period.
• On a similar note, a lot more baby-eating and baby-murder than I was expecting.
• Re: Lucy – not everyone has the same blood type. I’m surprised this didn’t come up as a possibility to either Van Helsing or Dr. Steward when Lucy continued failing in health after all the men gave her blood.
• The ending was a let down after how good the rest of the book was. Build for 200+ pages to this epic climax, to then have it all wrapped up over the course of 2 or 3 pages.
• There is a potential Coens Brothers-esque film here in which no vampire exists. Just a nice old count who desperately wants to escape the overly supersticious and paranoid people of rural run-down Romania to move to modern, upbeat London, but is harrassed and eventually murdered by a psychotic professor and a schizophrenic realtor and their cohorts. Do it Hollywood!

Highly recommended; 4 out of 5 vampire bats for general audiences.