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Title: Dracula (Longman Classics, Stage 3) by Bram Stoker, John Turvey ISBN: 0-582-52282-X Publisher: Longman Science & Technology Pub. Date: August, 1988 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.88

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Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (257 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Dracula-Sweetheart of Darkness
Comment: If you are looking for a great book to read, Bram Stoker's Dracula could be your perfect choice.
The plot alone gives enough good reason to read this book. To start with, it's a classic. You can never go wrong with a classic. It's books like this that enrich your literary reading. Along with being a classic, Dracula demands that you take time to sit and read. It requires thought. By doing this it doesn't make the book seem too easy and a waste of time and effort. At the same time it's not too hard to understand. Dracula is great for all you out there who enjoy the supernatural. This is one that lets you escape and experience some of the creepy yet exciting events that do not occur in our everyday life, or world for that matter.
Bram Stoker offers some intersesting characters in his book. It is hard to become bored with with a particular character throughout the entire book. Plus, if a madman that eats flies doesn't intrest you, then I don't think that anything will. Such charateristics really give the characters of Dracula stand out personalities. A madman, a prisoner, two doctors, a woman being turned into a vampire, the list goes on and on. These are merely labels compared to how the book presents them. It is easy to get to know a certain character so well that you can relate to them, or somewhat of their experience. This really helps to get into the book.
The theme of Dracula really fits nicely with the plot and characters. First off I must give my satisfaction with the writing style. Not many authors use letters, diary entries, logs, and newspaper clippings to tell their story. This writing style really explores every character's point of view. It really helps the reader to know what is going on throughout the book. If that doesn't get the reader involed in the book, then the setting will. It goes from creepy castles to ships with dead men to civilization and so on. Without the setting it just wouldn't be the same. The setting really helps to establish a good basis for the plot and the characters. The genre of this book is considered to be gothic. When reading the book I noticed that it fits the five characteristics of a gothic piece of literature. It has a creepy setting, a damsel in distress, the supernatural, and gore. The wonderful gothic setting of old victorian England is the perfect environment for this delightfully dark book.

Rating: 4
Summary: The best way to absorb the Dracula myth...
Comment: Bram Stoker had absolutely no idea just what sort of monster he was creating. I refer not to his title character, but to the book itself. It is highbrow enough that scholars and literary types feel the need to include it (if, perhaps, toward the bottom) on their lists of exemplary 19th-century popular literature, yet lowbrow enough to interest the common reader. This is not a slight to the "common reader"; I'm one, too, and I tire of dense, obnoxiously self-important prose. Stoker's goal was not to write "important" books. He knew exactly who his readers were - real people, not literary critics. That he managed to rise somewhat above even his own expectations with Dracula is a testament to his often latent skill. Stephen King has benefited from the seriousness with which some critics have taken Dracula, by often being taken more seriously than he perhaps deserves. King knows this, too; he has often described himself, tongue in cheek, as the McDonald's or General Motors of horror fiction. Stoker, while never as consistently successful as King, might have applied a similar description to himself.

Dracula, though written at the end of the 19th century, seems a fairly modern book, at it moves swiftly and employs suspense techniques often associated with more recent books and films (i.e., the shifting point-of-view, "cross-cutting", if you will, between different first-person narratives to build tension). It works exceedingly well, providing a model and formula followed by many successors - though often with less impressive results.

The central villain - Count Dracula himself - is quite rightly absent from the stage a good deal of the time, so that he may grow in the imagination of the reader as his invisible presence permeates nearly every page. He is always just on the other of the window, door, or wall, or just across the street - his nefarious intentions influencing events as the book draws inexorably toward confrontation with the monster.

Dracula's flaw is also, in a way, its virtue: there are no evil human characters. Almost everyone is quite heroic and selfless in a sort of two-dimensional way. It is not that the characters are underdeveloped (as many complain), but that they tend to be representative of human beings' more enviable qualities, and therefor seem less realistic to the modern reader. But, then, one has to realize that the entire book is composed of diaries, letters, and faux-news clippings. I get a sense of subtle humor, of the "unreliable narrator" sort, from some passages of Dracula, as characters make themselves out to be more chivalrous, loving, and trusting than, perhaps, they actually were during the "real" events they describe. For example, one can only infer Dr. Seward's actual response to Van Helsing's request for autopsy knives so he can decapitate his beloved Lucy's corpse and take out her heart before burial! Reading between the lines, Seward's description of the event in his diary becomes darkly funny as he struggles to maintain a sense of 19th-century British decorum while relating the scene. His description of Van Helsing's anguish gives us a clue: Seward seems to suspect his mentor may be going off the deep end, and his expressions of blind trust in the old man may be a way of placating him.

Dracula's greatest virtue, though, is its well-oiled plot. It's an impressive machine that still functions marvelously more than a century after its making. It is a mean, sharp skeleton fleshed out with numerous horrific digressions (the episodes with Dracula's "brides", the log of the Demeter, the "bloofer lady", etc.) that serve as tiles in a mosaic gradually completing the rather lean narrative that develops from them. Compare it with, say, Peter Straub's rather bloated attempt at the same technique in Floating Dragon, a rather messy and unsatisfying novel with isolated moments of brilliance, and you start to realize what a taut, precise engine Stoker really fashioned.

What keeps me from giving Dracula five stars is that it's necessarily limited by its own goals. Truly great popular novels somehow manage to tell exciting stories while also reaching more deeply than they pretend. They reverberate on levels well above (and below) their apparent target. While many have read exotic psychosexual interpretations into Dracula, I find it shallows out rather quickly once it has served up its scares and menace. Yes, there is a genuine (and intended) erotic subtext, but it fails to be profoundly illuminating, since it was never intended to be. It serves its disquieting purpose, and then departs, rather than lingering. That's how Stoker designed his effects, and they work perfectly. He set out to write a good four-star novel, and he did.

A hundred years later, it's still good four-star novel, popular as ever, as well it deserves. Excellent work, and worth a place in your library.

Rating: 5
Summary: Uber-cool
Comment: Now, I haven't read all of the books in the world. But I do know that out of all the ones that I have, I would say that Dracula has to be in my top ten. There is no one cooler than this guy, he can fly like a bat, run like a wolf, crawl like a gecko, and he never dies if supplied. The guy is just a beast. In addition to the coolness factor that this guy has, the book is suspenseful, contains fleshed out characters with a kickin' storyline. How can you just not feel like you are running scared like Harker through the Dracula mansion? Outstanding in every way. This is definitely reccommended.

Hoo-ah!