Book #66: Dracula by Bram Stoker

This is one of those books that you think you're so familiar with that you assume that you've read it, until you sit down and realize you have no idea what the story is about. Kind of like Frankenstein (which I did read in college but I don't remember the particulars of the story at all now... maybe I'll try to read it around Halloween this year). It's funny that we ALL know who Dracula is, but I had no idea what the book Dracula was about. I decided to read this because Tommy read it a few months ago (he was reading it in the hospital while I was in labor with Lucy, which is ironic because there is a woman who turns vampire named Lucy in the book), and he really enjoyed it.

The story of Dracula starts with a young lawyer who gets sent to Transylvania to help a certain Count Dracula get ready to move to England. He becomes aware that weird things are going on and that he is a prisoner in the castle. He eventually escapes, and the action moves to England, where Count Dracula comes and begins to wreak havoc on the people there, turning people into vampires and sucking their blood. A band of brave men (and a woman) works together to fight against him and try to destroy him, despite all the odds being stacked against them. I was really interested in a lot of the story, but there was a lot of build-up in the story too (very Victorian, Dickensian, etc.). There were fifteen pages left and they still hadn't found Dracula yet, although there were at least 50 pages of build-up and journeying to find him that we'd just gone through. It seemed like a bad balance of lead-up and climax--there should have been more climax, and more denouement. It literally ended on the same page as the fight with Dracula--there was no more story to it at all. But some of that was probably the literary style of the time. Overall, though, I was super interested in the story and pleased by how creepy it was at the same time--the age of the book hasn't lessened its creepiness factor at all. The imagery of Dracula forcing Mina to drink his blood is so scary that it totally still works. I'm glad I finally got around to reading this.