Dracula - Bram Stoker
Jun. 25th, 2022 10:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxI finished Dracula!! I found it very fun, overall, although there was definitely some stuff that was just, hoo boy, as a result of reading a book from 1897, 120+ years later. (Although some stuff aged better than expected or intended— like, hell yeah, Lucy! You should be able to marry three guys!) I really enjoyed the narrative style - a story pieced together through letters and diary entries by different characters, occasional newspaper articles for spice, etc. - and I was surprised and charmed by the ratio of fairly straightforward detective work to Dramatic Battles that went into vampire-hunting— e.g., I feel like there was way more of Jonathan and co. gumshoeing around London, than stakeouts with literal stakes.
Re: Mina almost turning into a vampire— the mental link with Dracula was v. cool, the "please read the Burial Service over me in case you have to kill me later" less so. (Seriously, the number of times characters in this book were like, sometimes it is okay and even romantic to kill your wife!— and like, I know the context here is vampires, but Mina also explicitly references men killing their wives to prevent them from being Dishonored in times of war— was my biggest mental record scratch, while reading this.) Absolutely hollering that everyone spent multiple chapters being like "huh, Mina has been really pale and tired since we all left her alone to go vampire-hunting, but I'm sure she's fine??" when they had just gone through this with Lucy— like, even though Jonathan and Mina hadn't been there, they'd all read each other's diaries at that point!! We - reader, characters - literally all had the net same amount of information!!! Guys, you no longer had the excuse of not knowing you're in a vampire story!!!!
NOBODY WARNED ME THAT QUINCEY DIES?????? BOOOO :( —but in the epilogue, it is very cute that Jonathan and Mina named their son after all of their friends (tired: Albus Severus Potter; wired: Quincey John Arthur Abraham Lucy Harker— or some order thereof; it just says they gave him "a bundle of names" in honor of everyone but call him Quincey). My brain momentarily interpreted the line that "both Godalming and Seward are happily married" as them being married to each other; I'm invoking death of the author and also historical accuracy, this is my canon ending now.
Re: Mina almost turning into a vampire— the mental link with Dracula was v. cool, the "please read the Burial Service over me in case you have to kill me later" less so. (Seriously, the number of times characters in this book were like, sometimes it is okay and even romantic to kill your wife!— and like, I know the context here is vampires, but Mina also explicitly references men killing their wives to prevent them from being Dishonored in times of war— was my biggest mental record scratch, while reading this.) Absolutely hollering that everyone spent multiple chapters being like "huh, Mina has been really pale and tired since we all left her alone to go vampire-hunting, but I'm sure she's fine??" when they had just gone through this with Lucy— like, even though Jonathan and Mina hadn't been there, they'd all read each other's diaries at that point!! We - reader, characters - literally all had the net same amount of information!!! Guys, you no longer had the excuse of not knowing you're in a vampire story!!!!
NOBODY WARNED ME THAT QUINCEY DIES?????? BOOOO :( —but in the epilogue, it is very cute that Jonathan and Mina named their son after all of their friends (tired: Albus Severus Potter; wired: Quincey John Arthur Abraham Lucy Harker— or some order thereof; it just says they gave him "a bundle of names" in honor of everyone but call him Quincey). My brain momentarily interpreted the line that "both Godalming and Seward are happily married" as them being married to each other; I'm invoking death of the author and also historical accuracy, this is my canon ending now.
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Date: 2022-06-25 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-25 07:47 pm (UTC)YEAH. It's just wild to me that Stoker doubled down on that.
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Date: 2022-06-27 10:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-06-27 01:28 pm (UTC)I think you were the one who mentioned fic on a previous comment? I'll take recommendations if you have them!
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Date: 2022-06-28 04:30 pm (UTC)https://lunabee34.dreamwidth.org/tag/recs:+dracula
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Date: 2022-06-28 04:58 pm (UTC)