Fiction Reviews
Dracula
A Mystery Story & Dracula’s Guest(1897 / 2025) Bram Stoker, Flame Tree Press,
£9.99 / Can$16.99 / US$11.99, hrdbk, 575pp, ISBN 978-1-835-62277-3
Here we go again, as Flame Tree Publishing rings the changes and produces another series of fine-looking books. It is hard to keep up with all the various editions they bring out, and even harder to discern who is the actual editor of some of their anthologies or collections, but that’s another story. Here we have a small, pocket-sized, “little treasure” edition of Dracula under the banner 'Flame Tree Collectable Classics' complete with a classy cover, a ribbon marker, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. If the Dracula on the front cover of this nifty little volume looks familiar, then it should be, as it is based on an image of Bela Lugosi, arguably the most famous Dracula of them all (sorry, Christopher Lee fans). The back cover also features an illustration, this time taken from the 1919 edition of Dracula drawn by Edgar Alfred Holloway, showing a white-haired and white-whiskered Dracula climbing down the walls of Castle Dracula, rather like a lizard, but more like a bat, I suppose.
Apart from the actual novel, and the short story 'Dracula’s Guest', readers are also treated to an introduction by Dr. Carol Senf, three pages of recommended 'further reading', a biographical note about the life and works of Bram Stoker and a handy glossary of gothic, Victorian and literary terms – very handy.
These additions may be compared to an aperitif and digestif, accompanying the main meal, but what of that meal itself? Dracula, of course, is an example of an epistolary novel, where the story is told through letters or diary extracts, but Stoker widens the form by making it a polyphonic novel using letters and diary extracts from several characters and widens the form again by including a captain’s log, dictation cylinders and newspaper accounts to provide the text. Of course, modern epistolary novels include things such as emails, blog posts, interviews and even PowerPoint presentations.
Dracula is the granddaddy of the vampire novel – it wasn’t the first vampire story, but it continues to loom large over that horror sub-genre, casting out legends, myths, and the whole paraphernalia of what a vampire is, and how it can be destroyed. If Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the archetypal monster story, then Dracula is the vampire version. Yet, how many people have actually read both novels? They think they might know the story, but that is probably by being saturated by the many TV and film versions that pop up from time to time, giving the stories a new, or novel twist, especially Dracula, who has been portrayed as being anything from being evil incarnate, a cursed lover, to a romantic hero.
As the novel is told through the words of several characters, it is unsurprising that the best part of the novel is the first part, which is more coherent, being told by only one voice over almost seventy pages. These pages consist of extracts from Jonathan Harker’s journal as he visits Castle Dracula to conclude some business with Count Dracula. Harker is a wide-eyed, naive, Englishman abroad, and the reader shares his observations and sense of adventure, which is quickly replaced by confusion when he is shunned by the superstitious locals when they learn of his destination, one woman even presses her crucifix on him. Then he is met by a coachman with burning eyes and sharp teeth who seems to have some power over the local wolves. Soon he is at the castle and meets the Count who is old, aristocratic and speaks perfect English. Those are the Count’s plus points.
The negatives? Well, he keeps strange hours, doesn’t seem to eat, doesn’t seem to cast a reflection, and becomes almost feral at the sight of blood. Even more alarmingly, he seems to be growing younger and stronger. Harker realises that he will never leave the castle, and if the Count doesn’t kill him, the three strange woman who stalk the castle corridors will. He must escape or die trying. This first part of the novel is the strongest, and it is certainly the most horrific, but there are horrors to follow when the ship, the Demeter, sails into Whitby without a crew except for the dead captain tied to the wheel and clutching a crucifix.
At the time, Dracula was a very modern novel. There were dictation machines, typewriters, blood transfusions and Dracula himself is a man out of time, an ancient coming from the wilds of Transylvania to the modern world and being over-powered by it and having to flee back to his roots.
Much has been made of the eroticism of the story, but it is a tale not without its flaws. Dracula looms large over the narrative, but after Harker’s encounter with him, he is hardly in the story. New readers will either love Draculaand recognise it for the classic it is, or think it is slow, and not the Draculathey expected. It is also a landmark novel for the appearance of a what might be called a Victorian “Scooby gang” as Jonathan, his wife Mina, Quincey Morris, John Seward, and Arthur Holmwood unite to stand against Dracula, under the guidance of Seward’s old professor, Abraham Van Helsing. This edition is topped off by the short story 'Dracula’s Guest' which appeared two years after Stoker’s death. There has been much discussion that it is a missing part of an earlier draft of the novel, although it is told in the first-person and not through a journal entry, and the narrator is more confident than Jonathan Harker, and as a story, it owes a debt to Sheridan Le Fanu’s 'Carmilla'.
Hats off to Flame Tree for this great little edition, and once finished, readers of Dracula can then move on to Kim Newman’s wonderful Anno Dracula series, in which the dead continue to travel fast.
Ian Hunter
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