Dracula (Modern Library Classics)
by Bram Stoker
The Book That Launched a Thousand Goth Albums
A review by Doug Brown
Recently suffering through Francis Ford Coppola's lurid soft-porn goth fantasy film Bram Stoker's Dracula sparked me to pull out the novel and read it yet again, just to remind myself how little the two have in common. Despite the title, Coppola's film owes much more to Jean Cocteau and Anne Rice than anything Bram Stoker wrote. There is no "love never dies" Beauty and the Beast subplot in Stoker's novel, nor is Dracula a goth wet dream of a tormented melancholic soul with a rock star's fashion sense. Stoker's Dracula is a creepy monster, and the novel is much cooler for it.
If there were a machine that could selectively erase memories, I would use it to erase all knowledge of the name Dracula from my mind so that I could read Stoker's novel without any notion of what was coming next. For readers today, the novel has a dark horror tone from first page, because we all know who Dracula is. We hear the name Transylvania and we instantly think of vampires lying in coffins in ruined castles. I would love to read the novel without knowing any of that. For the first ten pages, it is just the story of a real estate lawyer traveling to central Europe to meet a nobleman about buying an old abbey in London. Then it starts getting really weird and creepy, and finally becomes a full-blown gothic horror novel.
There is also some dryly wicked Victorian social commentary peppered throughout. When Jonathan Harker finally escapes from Dracula's castle, he arrives in a small town called Klausenburg. As the story is related, "...the guard was told by the station-master there that he rushed into the station shouting for a ticket for home. Seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they gave him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither that the train reached."
Stoker cleverly tells the story entirely through diary entries, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper articles. There is no traditional narrative. This device pulls you into the story and presents a puzzle to be solved, as there is some chronological reconstruction required to get the sequence of events. Interestingly, Dracula rarely appears in the book. This is the major change that all filmed versions of the story have made; they have made Dracula the main character in terms of screen time. His longest appearance in the book is at the beginning, with Jonathan Harker in the castle. Once the story moves to England, however, Dracula only makes very brief cameos (to show up and drain someone). He never presents himself as a member of society as in most film versions. Van Helsing is also very different from the metaphysician of the films; he is an accomplished surgeon who never uses the words vampire or nosferatu until after Lucy has become one. If you have never read the book because you've seen the films and you think you know the story, think again.
Sadly, the best version of this book is out of print: The Annotated Dracula, edited by Leonard Wolf. Elements and terms from Victorian life are explained in the margins, maps are provided, and even recipes are given for meals that characters mention. For fans of the novel, it is worth seeking out a copy at a fine used book store (like, say, Powell's).
Oh, by the way, Dracula never says, "I never drink... wine." That line was invented in Tod Browning's 1931 film, and has been used in most Dracula films since. When invited to dine with Harker, Dracula actually says, "I do not sup," wryly leaving unspoken the fact that he only drinks (he doesn't sup -- he sips).
Click here to view our rare first US edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
|
|
Don't Miss
