Impaled
I'm finally finished with Dracula, which was about 400 pages of solid brick wall. The first six chapters were really, really good but then Stoker slows it down, way down, letting it slowly drip until the unsatisfying end. What I talk about next will spoil the ending, so be warned.
Our popular image of Dracula comes from the movies - in the book he is actually an older guy with a white moustache, though a lot of popular Dracula trivia are still true: he doesn't have a reflection, he can turn into a bat or a wolf, he is well mannered and well dressed, he is from Transylvania. I also learned some Dracula facts that aren't so popular: it's the flowers of garlic that repel him (not the roots that we eat), he can't cross running water except during high and low tide, he can't enter a house unless invited, he can scale walls like Spiderman, he has super strength, sunlight just weakens his powers (it doesn't kill him).
The end of Dracula is rather anticlimactic. Van Helsing, the Harkers and a few other characters follow him back to Transylvania and intercept his "coffin" (a box of soil in which he can rest) being transported by gypsies. They attack the gypsies and kill Dracula in his sleep before the sun sets. Although Stoker had built up a lot of good vehicles for suspense, such as Mina Harker slowly turning into a vampire and had foreshadowed the death of a character, he fails to put these to good use. Mina's vampirism doesn't cause her to turn on anybody and is erased with Dracula's death. There is no final epic battle with Dracula and the character who dies, Quincey Morris, (and dies of stabbing a la Gypsy no less) is such a minor character that he served no real purpose in the book, and nobody really cared that he died.
Stoker had set us up for either one of two things: first that Mina would become a full fledged vampire, attack her friends and they would have to kill her or second, that a major character would die in a meaningful way (Van Helsing, Arthur Holmwood or Jonathan Harker). None of these happened, and I'm kind of disappointed.
Stoker did another thing which annoyed me: if the character had an accent, he would write it out phonetically: such as "Ar sweer I sar th' Deil" instead of "I swear I saw the Devil". He did this with yokel townspeople and also with Van Helsing's Dutch tainted English. It makes it impossible to read.
I wasn't horrified or held in suspense when reading this book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, unless they wanted to understand it as a source of today's popular perception of vampires.
On to Wicked. If you haven't made a suggestion for my 2007 reading list, do so now.
Our popular image of Dracula comes from the movies - in the book he is actually an older guy with a white moustache, though a lot of popular Dracula trivia are still true: he doesn't have a reflection, he can turn into a bat or a wolf, he is well mannered and well dressed, he is from Transylvania. I also learned some Dracula facts that aren't so popular: it's the flowers of garlic that repel him (not the roots that we eat), he can't cross running water except during high and low tide, he can't enter a house unless invited, he can scale walls like Spiderman, he has super strength, sunlight just weakens his powers (it doesn't kill him).
The end of Dracula is rather anticlimactic. Van Helsing, the Harkers and a few other characters follow him back to Transylvania and intercept his "coffin" (a box of soil in which he can rest) being transported by gypsies. They attack the gypsies and kill Dracula in his sleep before the sun sets. Although Stoker had built up a lot of good vehicles for suspense, such as Mina Harker slowly turning into a vampire and had foreshadowed the death of a character, he fails to put these to good use. Mina's vampirism doesn't cause her to turn on anybody and is erased with Dracula's death. There is no final epic battle with Dracula and the character who dies, Quincey Morris, (and dies of stabbing a la Gypsy no less) is such a minor character that he served no real purpose in the book, and nobody really cared that he died.
Stoker had set us up for either one of two things: first that Mina would become a full fledged vampire, attack her friends and they would have to kill her or second, that a major character would die in a meaningful way (Van Helsing, Arthur Holmwood or Jonathan Harker). None of these happened, and I'm kind of disappointed.
Stoker did another thing which annoyed me: if the character had an accent, he would write it out phonetically: such as "Ar sweer I sar th' Deil" instead of "I swear I saw the Devil". He did this with yokel townspeople and also with Van Helsing's Dutch tainted English. It makes it impossible to read.
I wasn't horrified or held in suspense when reading this book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, unless they wanted to understand it as a source of today's popular perception of vampires.
On to Wicked. If you haven't made a suggestion for my 2007 reading list, do so now.