Monday, February 06, 2006

three/seventy-five

Sometime I need a little gentle prodding, a reminder that "classic" does not equal "boring."

Bram Stoker's Dracula has been sitting on my TBR shelf since last Hallowe'en. For all my love of vampire lore and my desire to bone up on the classics, I couldn't find the time to concentrate on it until last month.

I expected it to be dry and boring, but at least it would give me the vampire basics, right?

Damn, it was good. I honestly hadn't thought that Dracula would be scary, but I was creeped out several times while reading it in the wee hours of the morning. The way the story is told through correspondence and various characters' diary entries is very effective, and the plot moves along quickly enough that even the slow parts aren't boring.

Of course, the "women are such fragile flowers, weak of mind, body, and will, needing protection and to be brought to redemption through the acts of men" thing scraped my nerves a little bit. (Okay, a lot.) But I chalked it up to the gender roles of that era, breathed into a paper bag for a while, and tried to ignore it, although it got especially difficult when Mina was presented as almost a saint because she had a "man's mind" along with a woman's caring, delicate, etc. soul.

Aside from that, hehe, I thoroughly enjoyed the story. It's sweeping and melodramatic and gory and full of lovely creepy imagery, and it's a rollicking good time. A few spots are slow, but it doesn't stay slow for long enough to matter. The ending seemed a little abrupt, though.

By the way, the introduction by Leonard Wolf is definitely worth reading. Aside from letting the reader know how Dracula came to be, it also offers up a huge list of classic vampire stories and puts them in context.