Review: DRACULA by Bram Stoker

DRACULA by Bram Stoker published by Peter Bedrick Books in 1988.  The original copy was published in 1897. By the standards of today this book would be considered cumbersome, because we tend to look for a fast read and parts of this book cause us to reflect on the philosophy of the times. Especially in the last half of the book when our heroine Mina is described as having a masculine brain and our villain Dracula is said to have a child-like brain. Our Doctor Van Helsing waxes eloquently about these characteristics. I have to remember that at the time woman were thought to be without the ability to think for themselves. Knowing that our author was friends with writers such as Mary Shelley, we know that he had insight to the fact that women were capable of strategy and deep thought. There is a surprise from all the men when Mina announces that she knows the timetable for the trains that run and that she can use her brain to help them strategize the way to kill Dracula, though she has been bitten by Dracula.

That is just one theme that runs through the book. We have Dracula who has been around for some time, trying to conquer worlds. He is not always successful as we see in this book, that he has been forced back to his castle several times. This is the foreshadowing that knows that he can be defeated. But it also leads us to the fact that there must be several vampires (though they are not called that in the book,) or un-dead that Dracula has made in the past. We do not know if his death has released them from their bonds. We are introduced to the many ways to kill the un-dead, such as stakes through the heart, chopping off the head and filling it with garlic, plus some other methods. We are also introduced that the vampire bat can change shape from human to bat.

There are things that Dracula can do in this book that have not shown up in current stories of Dracula. For instance Dracula can shape shift into a wolf, reminding us of the werewolf. He can control not only humans but other species. The main thing that he can do that we do not see in other stories, is that he can actually come out in the daylight, There are conditions, but in a couple of scenes we have Dracula appear in the city, helping with his coffin, meeting people in his house. All these occur during the day. This makes me wonder, where did we get the notion that he sleeps all day. Our author attributed this to age of the vampire, because our first known new victim Lucy, must return to her coffin during the day-time.

I liked the format, though it took me a bit to recognize that when we shifted to other journal entries that I had to look at the dates of the entries. Jonathan Harkers initial entries start May through June 30th and are Chapters 1-4, Mina's letters to Lucy start chapter 5 and start May 9th. So the entries are not consecutive, not until all five main characters are together and Mina tries to keep everything ordered. Then towards the end of the book we have the split again as there are three groups heading in the same direction.

I really enjoyed the book, not so much the pictures in this edition. I think the pictures distracted from my vision of the story and the character Dracula, as I have said in a previous entry about the book, I guess I had a more Hollywood perception of Dracula.