Dracula, Bram Stoker (Barnes and Noble Classics)

I'm not going to bore you with an actual review of Dracula, as it is one of the great English classics and, if you haven't read it and are not planning to read it, fuck you.

Actually, I was a little ashamed that I hadn't read it myself—that it took The Historian to get me interested to get through it, after several attempts during the 7th grade (oh so long ago). I mean, isn't this one of the books that Harvard lists as one of the 100 books you should have read before graduating high school? (In fact, having lost my cheaply printed, mass-market paperback copy of the book I dug through my second-hand copies of The Harvard Classics trying to find it, to no avail.)

Despite my shame, I ended up picking up one of those deliciously beautiful six buck Barnes and Noble Collector's Library copies, all hardbound and gilt-edged. This I carried around with me, despite the fact that it looked like I was reading a copy of the Old Testament.

I was surprised at how much of the story I didn't even know—I suppose it had been a long time since I had seen either of the film adaptations from my youth—and was shocked when I realized that Stoker's book is made up entirely of journals, diaries, and correspondence between the characters; that is to say, no conventional third- or first-person narratives, just first-person narrative via documentation.

I was also pleased that, despite the fact that the book is well over 100 years old (1897), I still found it frightening at parts; I'm a kid of way too many horror films, which rarely scare me—but, at it's source, the vampire is one of the scariest creations of our race—something that comes at you at your weakest, then dooms you to a (un)life where you must perpetuate the curse. Fuck the Vampire Chronicles, which turns the vampire into a sort of romanticized ubermensch that you want to be like. Dracula strips that sort of feeling away; rather, it was before that concept was created. Dracula is represented as a scourge, a villain, and the worst of his kind.

As well it should be.

And, look, this copy has a forward by Elizabeth Kostova.