I was prompted to read Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” after the recent success of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series of romantic vampire novels. Vampire folklore apparently goes back to the 1700’s, and the story of the suave captivating vampire apparently began with John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” in 1819. However it is Stoker’s 1897 novel that is remembered today as the one that launched the modern day vampire horror story genre. As a point of interest, the vampire bats native to South America do not occur in Europe, and apparently the bats are named after the monsters of folklore rather than the other way around. The book is an epistolary novel meaning it’s narrated from entries in the diaries and journals of the characters as well as through telegrams, newspaper stories, and letters. This approach allows the reader to get multiple points of view throughout the story.
Jonathan Harker is a newly minted solicitor who is dispatched to Transylvania to visit Count Dracula at his castle and go over paperwork for Dracula’s purchase of an old abbey in London. Not long after his arrival, it becomes apparent that Harker is being held captive by the Count, who is a rather unusual old guy. The castle is also home to three seductive female vampires one of whom almost manages to seduce Harker before Dracula intercedes. Harker escapes from the castle and recuperates in Budapest where his fiancée Mina Murray travels to nurse him back to health and marry him. Mina’s friend Lucy Westenra back in London has received proposals of marriage from three men in one day: the American Quincey Morris, Dr. John Seward, and Arthur Holmwood. Lucy accepts the wealthy Holmwood, but her tendency to sleepwalk gets her into trouble when she encounters Dracula who has arrived (in the form of a dog) on a ship that set sail from Varna and landed in Whitby. Lucy begins to suffer an odd illness characterized by extreme pallor, and Seward enlists the aid of his old professor Dr. Abraham Van Helsing from Amsterdam. Unfortunately, Lucy is well on the road to becoming a vampire herself and after “dying” starts feeding on children in the London area. Van Helsing and Holmwood are forced to put an end to Lucy’s nocturnal escapades by opening her tomb during the day, driving a stake through her heart, cutting off her head and stuffing her mouth with garlic. It seems somewhat harsh, but at least her soul can rest in peace now that she is no longer one of the “un-dead.”
A fair portion of the book drags on somewhat tediously, but the final sequence in which the group chases down Dracula as he attempts to have his coffin moved by boat from England back to Transylvania is very suspenseful. The suspense is heightened by the fact that Mina is partially under the influence of Dracula because he has fed on her several times and has forced her to feed on his own blood. It is not clear whether or not Mina is doomed to become a vampire herself and whether she is consciously or unconsciously abetting Dracula. Mina and Van Helsing are making their way to the castle by land as are Morris and Seward. Holmwood and Harkin are chasing the boat that is carrying Dracula’s coffin up the Sereth River by means of a steam launch. Ultimately, Quincey Morris and Mina’s husband Jonathan overtake the wagon with Dracula’s coffin just as it is approaching the castle at sunset (when the vampire would be free to move about on his own). Just in time, the two manage wrench open the coffin, stab his heart with a Bowie knife and slash his throat. He crumbles to dust, and the world is saved from any further proliferation of vampires.
