While nothing will help me understand the mania for vampires, at least this book was genuinely creepy...creepy enough that I had to make a classmate who always parked nearby walk me to my car and check underneath it to make sure some man in a cape wasn’t clinging to the bottom waiting to grab my ankles or WORSE. The beginning is that scary. Portentous weather, foreboding landscape, cryptic warnings from the natives, freaky castle, freakier inhabitants....it all looks very grim for our hero, a hapless solicitor sent to Transylvania to help a client transition some of his affairs to England. The atmosphere of danger and doom make even the most implausible elements (wolves with glowing eyes! men crawling down castle walls!) completely chilling. For the first few chapters I was too creeped out to walk outside alone at night, hence the forced chivalry.

Then, in what feels like a bait and switch but of course isn't, the narrative shifts and we’re back in England with the hero’s fiancée, Lucy, and her best friend. This should be where things get interesting, as Dracula – the ancient, foreign menace – is now coming to safe & familiar England to search for new victims, and we get to see his powers of seductive corruption in action. However, the story loses some of its zing, and all the doom and dread and “What could this mean?!” I was sucked into in Transylvania seemed faintly ridiculous in the London sections. Alas.

On the plus side, I enjoyed Stoker’s commentary on understanding evil. The company of Englishmen in Dracula is too modern, too complacent with scientific understanding to figure out Lucy’s decline. Only Dr. Van Helsing knows to hearken back to legends, traditions and folklore in order to apprehend the threat. It’s an interesting approach, for Van Helsing does not pit science against faith, or pagan myths against Christianity; rather, he pits modern, rational science against the mythical and supernatural. Van Helsing is not a priest, and although he uses symbols of salvation (a crucifix and communion wafers), the battle he wages is more spiritual than religious, the conflict between good and evil more in the mystical rather than in the orthodox realm.

Dracula is well suited to an age of rapid scientific and technological development, for it speaks to the limitations of man’s purely rational achievements. Plus, it packs a double whammy of gothic horror: Dracula does not merely exert physical control by kidnapping women or locking them in a tower – he also produces spiritual enslavement and damnation, which must be combated by similarly spiritual means. However, the corrupting influence of Dracula is neither immediate nor absolute; Dracula can outmaneuver our band of Englishmen but not defeat them; he’s tricky, not invincible. And, most importantly, he’s subject to the strength of goodness and to the ultimate power of death. *SPOILER ALERT* Significantly, Lucy’s soul is returned to a state of purity when she dies, and even Dracula himself seems released from the evil possessing him when he is defeated. For some reason, this facet has been jettisoned in contemporary vampire stories, in which the vampire main characters are attractive victims of circumstance who try to control their blood lust, against whom neither man nor death has any power, only fellow vampires. In this vision, vampirism is contained – though never defeated – not by religious symbols, but by individual will. Does this mean that there is no possibility of redemption from evil, only management of it? And vampires, with their strength of body or strength of will, are the ultimate power in the world? I find this more disturbing and ridiculous than the original vampire legends.

There are about a million critical essays on the cultural/psychological/religious/sexual issues Dracula brings up, which are interesting, but for me those issues are secondary to the actual novel, which isn’t spectacularly written. Still, it’s worth reading.