Dracula by Bram Stoker (May-June 3, 2005)
I has tried to read Dracula a number of years ago, and never managed to finish it because I did not enjoy the narration, which takes place entirely as journal entries and letters. At the time, I found the style distracting, but on my recent reading, I realized that this method increased the suspense and excitement of the story. The authors and their stories are linked together and the information is pieced together as a puzzle. The reader benefits from chronology of events, while the characters struggle to piece together their information.
Lucy Westerna and Mina Harker are dear friends. Mina’s fiancé, Jonathan Harker, is a young lawyer traveling to Transylvania to finalize a real estate purchase with Count Dracula. His time at Dracula’s castle is alarmingly strange and eventually Harker finds himself a captive. Meanwhile in England, Lucy Westenra is bitten by a vampire and is showing strange symptoms. Her family doesn’t realize this and thinks she is endangering herself by sleepwalking. Mina comes to stay with her. Along with Mina, three men share a love and concern for Lucy: Dr. Seward, Lucy’s fiancé, Arthur, and a Texan, named Quincey Morris. As Lucy’s condition worsens, Dr. Seward summons his friend Dr. Abraham Van Helsing for more medical advice, and Lucy goes through a number of blood transfusions, and eventually dies. After Lucy's death, "the Bloofer Lady," begins attacking young children in the area. During this time, Harker has escaped and after he recovers from the events at the castle, he and Mina marry. Mina transcribes all of Jonathan’s diaries, and after Van Helsing reads it, he realizes that Lucy has become a vampire. Van Helsing wants to open Lucy’s coffin and with the others, they save Lucy’s soul, by driving a wooden stake through her heart, cutting off her head and stuffing it with garlic. The group then set off to find and kill Count Dracula.
While this story is well-known and has been played out in countless ways
in films, reading the novel was a very different experience. Though I’m
sure it would have been even more exciting had I known nothing of the plot,
there were still many surprises in this classic horror story, and reasons
to be chilled by the supernatural events in it.
