Dracula: Slipping into a Fever Dream
Good horror is hard to come by. Great horror is a rarity that borders on probable impossibility. With such an atmosphere lurking behind my ears, Bram Stoker’s Dracula — colloquially termed as the earliest horror novel ever — comes as a fresh surprise. One of the heavier classics, this is an epistolary novel visualized through the shifting perspectives of its characters. Dissecting the sundry journal entries and telegrams lends a realistic touch to an otherwise fantastical story talking about blood-lust and death.
In cruder terms, the book poses as a great-grandfather to the more contemporary Twilight series, but is in no way anachronistic in its approach. The prose is rich but not exhaustive. There are moments you gasp out loud at and instances that make you groan. It reaches a certain lull — describing three courtships and one shipwreck — but it picks up the pace soon thereafter.
It begins with the journey of one Jonathan Harker to the dark corners of Transylvania and his stay at the dreary castle of Count Dracula. What follow are intensive conversations on politics, history and estate minutiae of England and mysterious sojourns along stone corridors and locked doors. By the time Jonathan realizes the danger he is in, it appears to be too late, but he somehow manages to escape. How he forms alliances with unexpected fellows, powered by the ingenuity of his wife, to destroy Dracula’s reign once and for all forms the rest of the story.
Stoker is famously said to have visited Whitby, an English coastal town, in 1890 — the birthplace of his inspiration for Dracula. It comes as little surprise then that his prose is replete with vivid imageries and lush landscapes. The novel is steeped in a gothic mist and the element of horror relies more on this ineffable air than mere jump-scares.
“I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.”
A story that keeps you engaged in a feverish madness and at the edge of your proverbial and literal seat, it is a nail-biting chase reaching a fitting denouement.
