Dracula by Bram Stoker

It seems appropriate writing a blog about this book, as the book itself is full of people "doing their due diligence" and writing up their diaries despite being tired. Perhaps I should explain. Dracula is a book about vampires (dur), but without any of the teenage emo that seems to dominate modern vampire fiction. The book is told through a series of diary entries made by 5 or so main characters. I really enjoyed this book at first, the opening chapters are set in Dracula's Transalvanian (sp?) castle and are very atmospheric and build a sense of dread and suspense.

Unfortunetly, the book really doesn't capitalize on this very well. The sense of a coming climactic resolution just continues to build (I swear I was three quarters of the way through before the word "vampire" is mentioned) and when there finally is a showdown with the undead, it's given about as much attention as "preparing refreshment" and the many other banal events that feature in the journal entries. I guess the justification for the endless "what I had for breakfast" details in the journal entries is to make them feel more genuine, but as the diaries are full of long conversations and detailed descriptions that are meant to be remembered word for word, they are never going to feel truly authentic.

The other thing that really irked me was the prim and proper way in which the characters always behaved even in the most dire of circumstances. With the possible exception of the foreign doctor Van Helsing and Dr Steward, the warden of the local insane asylum, this made the characters very one dimensional and without any real depth.

Ultimately I don't regret reading it and I would probably have enjoyed it if it was 100 odd pages shorter, as it is I was pretty sick of it by the end. Still, the opening few chapters up until the narrative leaves castle Dracula are excellent and worth reading for the obvious influence on all other vampire fiction since.