Dracula, Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker’s Dracula possesses this powerful yet understated horror – a creeping terror which floods the atmosphere with a hesitant dread, a rolling fog of suspense. Dracula himself is a mysterious, unknown horror; inhuman and unfeeling. Jonathan Harker, one of the novel’s narrators, and indeed the initial voice, steels himself against the strange and disturbing occurrences at the Dracula Estate in Romania. Harker is a resilient, courageous character, not simply for surviving the course of horrors held within the very stones of Dracula’s castle, but also for his unerring knowledge of his own moral code, his curious endurance and natural sense of analysis which help him to navigate the dark, roiling waves of mystery surrounding blue flames, impossible shadows, and defiance of the natural order. Stoker’s prose is succinct, to the point, describing things so simply and clearly that the reader somehow bypasses the strange textual window separating the living from dead words, not reading the novel, but rather watching it. The chapters are long, but intensely descriptive, with nothing too ‘flowery,’ too decadent to break the suspension of disbelief.

The novel begins slowly, a peculiar sense of simultaneity with Harker’s train ride to the east, a slow dissolving of Western sensibility and the entrance of a new, dark, unknown culture, a history of monsters hidden within the mountains, where the dead often travel faster than the living. A setting where the impossible and improbable are simply a linguistic denial, a residual coping mechanism from the terrors suffered from the dark as children, and the sneaking suspicion that perhaps anything really is possible. Stoker pulls the reader into this smoke-and-mirrors world so slowly and subtly that the acceptance of the strange, the unfamiliar, is somehow more and more plausible— even expected.

As the novel progresses, the reader becomes ensnared within the dreadful, twisting words of Dracula, the English cadence of Harker’s rationalizations, and eventually the pure tones of Mina; the logical science of Van Helsing. The narrations are, at first, cumbersome to remember, but the buildup is so perfect, so strong, that the voices don’t matter as long as there is just a larger glimpse of Dracula, of what his plans entail. The mystery surrounding him is so complete the reader may think it impenetrable, and as soon as the thought of putting the book down in frustration seems to tingle in the back of the mind, suddenly he appears, quick and smooth like the falling of night, ready to capture all misplaced attention and replace it with the urge to turn the page just once more, just once more, once more…

Dracula, in all its forms, has always been a longtime favorite for myself, and the novel did not disappoint the curious, ravenous part of me which itched for information on the unliving legend; the suspense and mystery which awaited me, a veil of dread waiting to be parted, made my heart race irrationally, my breath to hold itself in my lungs and refuse to exit until I had turned the page. It was so utterly thrilling and terrifying and courageous in turns — a truly beautiful, wonderful experience. I highly recommend it to anyone who can read.