I liked the book up until the correspondence with the letters came in. I had trouble keeping up and just overall wasn't a fan of reading the story through letters
That's called epistolary style novels. Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are written like that too. It was a popular 'realistic' writing style in the nineteenth century to make it look like a compilation of documents telling you the 'facts' of something that 'happened.'
I'm just glad Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo never used that style.
I enjoyed this novel up until the point where they're chasing the Count back to Transylvania. By that point I was wanting them to stake him already, but I wonder if I will have a different outlook on it with a second reading. Dracula is not my favorite Stoker book, but I still like it.
What others have you read? I have one or two, but I've never felt like reading them (I have about 400 books to be read in random boxes, though). I actually picked up a copy of another one of his books, because I don't think there are many currently in print, and it turned out to be an abridged version. DX
In my honest opinion, I thought that The Jewel of Seven Stars was much better than Dracula. It could be a personal bias because I find Egyptology more interesting than vampires, but that's what I felt. Truly I couldn't put it down!
There's actually an official sequel now written by Stoker's great grand nephew. It's called the Un-Dead. It came out two months ago. It has some bad reviews though.
Yes, I hve a copy but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet. I've heard the movie for the 'official' sequel is already in production. After Stoker's widow died the copyright lapsed. His family hasn't gotten the money for Dracula in over a decade. It's now public domain. So now they're trying to regain some claim with this new sequel.
It was a bit slow at times, iirc, but I still liked it overall. I'm not much into horror/"Gothic literature" anymore, though...and I don't think I've really read anything that's strictly in the genre since maybe 8th or 9th grade.
Aaanyway, there's parts of Dracula that still stand out to me, though. Like, somewhere in the beginning where the flecks of dust transform into three sisters while the main character is still half asleep, and hover over him.
Like I said in the last rant about vampires, I like that the old books like these have roots in superstitions and can tell you a lot about people in the day. For example, one of the things brought up in this book (and an element that was played out in Wuthering Heights, too) was the idea of the dead not actually being dead, because they looked healthy and fleshy when catacombs were reopened for shared graves or something like that. What they didn't realize was the body actually was decomposing...from the inside out. And that decomposition released gasses and stuff that made the
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I'm just glad Oscar Wilde, Charles Dickens, and Victor Hugo never used that style.
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I love Les Miserables. I'm not so much a fan of The Hunchback of NotreDame but I love Les Miserables.
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The only other full book of his I have at the moment, at least I think, is The Lair of the White Worm, which seems pretty out there.
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Aaanyway, there's parts of Dracula that still stand out to me, though. Like, somewhere in the beginning where the flecks of dust transform into three sisters while the main character is still half asleep, and hover over him.
Like I said in the last rant about vampires, I like that the old books like these have roots in superstitions and can tell you a lot about people in the day. For example, one of the things brought up in this book (and an element that was played out in Wuthering Heights, too) was the idea of the dead not actually being dead, because they looked healthy and fleshy when catacombs were reopened for shared graves or something like that. What they didn't realize was the body actually was decomposing...from the inside out. And that decomposition released gasses and stuff that made the ( ... )
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