Rereading Bram Stoker's Dracula

After having rewatched Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat's 2020 TV series Dracula on Netflix recently, I wanted to reread Bram Stoker's original novel. According to blog posts and book lists on my PC, I last read the book in January of 2016. Ten years ago this month.

I've seen countless film adaptations of the novel but it wasn't until the mid- 1970's that I first picked up the book. An older cousin of mine had given an annotated edition of the book to my younger brother and I picked it up then. Naturally, I don't recall much of the reading from over fifty years ago, other than I was turned off by the epistolary nature of the work. It's being a series of letters and diary entries kept me from rereading the book for many years.

As I said, it had been ten years since I last read Dracula and I suspected there would be much I'd forgotten. The book is very different than 99% of the film adaptations. Although some films follow the book better than others, I've never seen any Dracula film that is anywhere close to being 100% faithful to Stoker's novel.

The epistolary nature of the novel didn't bother me so much this time. What surprised me most was the fact that Count Dracula really isn't the main character as portrayed in film. We see him, of course when Harker comes to Transylvania at the beginning of the novel, but through out most of the book, the other characters take center stage.

There are long winded portions in the book and I wasn't happy about having to figure out Van Helsing's rather bizarre form of English. Still, it was a worthwhile read.