Given that I'm writing (more slowly these past two weeks or so) my rather epic novel about a Dhampir and his quest to be free of the destiny laid out by his vampiric father, it seemed appropriate for me to visit the quintessential vampire, so I've been reading Bram Stoker's Dracula. (Funny how, given its marketing and how it was referred to, the Francis Ford Coppola movie from the early 90s tends to be what I think of when I put the words "Bram Stoker's Dracula" into that sequence).
I'm still only a quarter or so into the book, but it's that funny thing where the story is so familiar due to pop culture osmosis for now 126 years that many elements are instantly recognizable. Just this year, we had a comedy imagining Renfield as a young man (how long do I get to think of Nicolas Hoult, who is three years younger than I am, as a "young man?") with Dracula as a toxic and overbearing boss. Later this year, The Last Voyage of the Demeter takes a couple-page passage from the novel that, in its epistolary format, is minimalistic terror as we get the logs of the captain of the ship that takes Dracula to England as his crew begins to vanish one by one while the Count feeds on them one by one.
I think what's surprising about the novel is how modern it feels. I read Frankenstein in high school, which I'd argue is, outside of Poe's short fiction, the other most quintessential gothic horror story, but it's sometimes easy to forget that Frankenstein and Dracula came 79 years apart, in wildly different cultural and historical contexts.
Indeed, I'd argue that the two might even take opposite positions, culturally. Frankenstein is all about the cold, industrial future leading to alienation and a heartlessness that can only result in violence taking the place of familial love, while Dracula is very much about the rational, modern world needing to fight against the archaic, mystical past.
Because Dracula is not just a bloodsucker and a sexual libertine (the latter somewhat implied, though heavily). He's also a brutal autocratic noble. In what might be the most chilling part of the story, after Jonathan Harker has realized he's not so much a guest as a prisoner of Dracula and his three vampiric women (often portrayed as a sort of harem, though it's not clear that he has that relationship with them,) a woman comes to the castle to demand her child back - a baby that Dracula fed to the women. She knows the baby is dead, but she demands to at least have the body to bury, and in response, Dracula sics his wolves on her, having them tear her apart in an act of unmitigated cruelty.
England of course has its history of exploitation by nobles, but there is also a tradition (adopted as well by Americans) of civil liberties - protections that the common people should have against those in power. Given Stoker was Irish, I wonder to what extent he was being ironic about the English claim to liberal ideals, but at least on the surface, the evil of Dracula is the logical extreme of aristocratic entitlement.
The format is also somewhat unconventional - it's an epistolary novel, which means that it takes the form of journals, news articles, and letters, as if Bram Stoker had discovered and collated these into a coherent narrative (though conveniently, the characters often write like novelists.)
Dracula, from the start, is a force of nature, but there's also a great deal of weirdness - when Jonathan first shows up to come to the castle in Transylvania, the carriage driver is very transparently Dracula himself, in disguise. If there's any reason to find sympathy with the Count (and not really,) it's that the guy needs to work very hard to make it look like he's actually got people working for him. The grandeur of his nobility is a facade, and he's only living (well, un-living) off of gold that was buried around his domain by people fearing it would be stolen in the many wars that were fought over it.
Anyway, I know how this all goes down, for the most part, but it is a good read.
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