Dracula in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Nov 03, 2013 Christine rated it really liked it

Shelves: halloween, horror

This remains a wonderful story. The opening is the strongest - super creepy journey through the Carpathian mountains and subsequent guest visit (which morphs into imprisonment in a very unsettling way) at Castle Dracula.

After that the story can drag at times, due to far too much phonetic dialect, too many iterations of Lucy coming back from the brink of death, and rising action toward the climax that sometimes feels like reading the time tables for trains & ships. Still, even in audio form when ...more

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Sep 17, 2009 Jeff Scott rated it really liked it

Shelves: audiobooks, 1001books, fiction, classics, audible, horror, male

Fear changes over time. It starts with a fear of the dark and grows into grotesque shapes and ideas. Our imaginations are boundless and it only takes a small seed of it to grow into a towering oak. However, there are certainly items that lose their terror with imitation and repetition. It’s difficult to imagine what was really scary about Dracula in the first place. However, a first person account of mystery beyond our knowledge has always fascinated us from epistolary novels like Dracula, to th Fear changes over time. It starts with a fear of the dark and grows into grotesque shapes and ideas. Our imaginations are boundless and it only takes a small seed of it to grow into a towering oak. However, there are certainly items that lose their terror with imitation and repetition. It’s difficult to imagine what was really scary about Dracula in the first place. However, a first person account of mystery beyond our knowledge has always fascinated us from epistolary novels like Dracula, to the more immediate format of home video camera in movies such as the Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity. It is more interesting to see what made people frightened in a certain time period, it tells more about societal fears than it does scare anyone anymore. Dracula, of course, must have had a large impact otherwise we wouldn’t be continually writing and referencing it over 100 years later.

I didn’t realize the novel was in journal form until I started listening to it. I picked up the audiobook from Audible that has Alan Cumming and Tim Ward reading, which was excellent. The technique is gripping in building suspense. Everything is told almost immediately after it happens as the reader is held in suspense until the next entry is announced. I can tell that Justin Cronin seemed to use this technique in The Passage, telling the story after the events happened and piecing it back together. The reader can feel the terror in Jonathan Harker’s heart as he writes what might be his last entry before attempting to scale the wall to his freedom, or death.

Overall, the story is actually rather schlocky. It is a horror story and adventure tale with very dated and wooden dialogue. There is a scene where Dracula is escaping the group and he turns and tells them how he has many other boxes and they will not stop him. It’s classic wooden villain dialogue. I’ve never read Dracula and only know it from the movie made in the 1930s and the other in the 1990s. The latter film, with Gary Oldman as Dracula, provides a more sympathetic look. He was a heroic fighter of the Turks who was betrayed by his allies. However, in the book his fight against the Turks is a demonstration of his relentless nature making him a formidable foe for the vampire killers. Elizabeth Kostova creates a far more sinister and timeless image in her book The Historian. Others have increased his power and those of his minions in seemingly hundreds of stories. The origin of the story itself seems a little tame in comparison. Dracula, however, will probably live on forever as our imaginations create new fears. The idea of vampires will always evolve to frighten us. This is the true gift of this story.
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Mar 10, 2016 Chris Friend rated it liked it

Shelves: monsters-in-lit-eng-215

Better than I’d expected. Interesting characters and even more interesting presentation of them and their goings-on. Uses a notebook format to present events through the journals and letters of a cast of characters, so everything is told through someone’s eyes. Keeping that narrator changing allowed Stoker to play with knowledge and ignorance of readers, explicitly keeping them in the dark at certain points. Effective storytelling.

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