Chris: It’s all over now. We’ve all finished reading Dracula, and now enter the final week of The Stake’s Winter Reading Club. This is when we take the time to synthesize. To bring it all together. To draw thoughtful conclusions about Bram Stoker’s novel, his culture, our culture, and…nevermind. Let’s go the ending.

I am SO FUCKING BUMMED Dracula did not get to have his moment in the final pages. All that tedium of collecting diaries, planning, sitting around, hypnotizing Mina, waiting for trains, waiting for ships, waiting for sunrise, riding horses, riding trains, riding horse-drawn carriages, waiting for horses to be changed, all in pursuit of Dracula, and when they finally catch up to him…they just…kill him.

POOF.

Dusted.

The most interesting character in Dracula is Mina Harker but only slightly behind her is Count Dracula, and Stoker does not even give him his moment in the end, to fight, to defend his life and death and acts of murder, to spit venom upon those who would kill him, nothing. He just lays there in his earth-box and then dies. I am disappointed.

In truth, I am disappointed in the entire final third of Dracula. Perhaps this comes from being so enthralled by the Stoker’s first 200 pages or so, but basically everything that happens once the merry band of nitwits (and Mina) are in the same place planning to pursue, and then pursuing Dracula leaves me cold.

The complexity of Bram Stoker’s structure, mixed with this political and social commentary, mixed with the exceptionally well written horror elements of Dracula had me really pumping my fists. So what happened? Where does that intellectual and primal excitement go?

There is some excitement, of course. Such as the scene in the final pages comes when Van Helsing, having protected himself from the three sisters of Dracula’s Castle through the night, then seeks out their castle homes and destroys them. The Professor struggles with his human impulse not to murder women in their sleep (always noble, that Van Helsing), and he knows they are protected by some supernatural power which encourages him to turn back. But he still goes through with his “butcher work,” as he calls it, for the sake of protecting Mina. Stoker finds a bit of his horror impulse here and lets it out to play as he describes their “writhing form, and lips of bloody foam.” Yikes.

I also have to stop and praise Stoker for his best character, Mina Harker. She elevates the novel with her presence, and certainly is the cause for any praise in the last third. Dracula feeds on Mina but also feeds Mina his blood, and she begins the slow transformation into the un-dead. As this happens, Mina begins to see Count Dracula as a man-something the men in the book have never been able to accomplish. She gains a new perspective on their pursuit to kill him and damn him because it’s possible that one day they must do the same to her. Her new vision of Dracula requires her to show him pity, and she tells the men to pity him, too, for, “One day, I too may need such pity.”

I must say I love this scene. And every scene that Stoker writes to give Mina the chance to prove the men wrong (which she does, consistently). It is Mina who teaches the men about the morality of hunting Dracula. It is Mina, too, who has the plans. She is the one who comes up with the hypnotism strategy, she is the one who deciphers what route Dracula is likely to take, how they should search, and why.

Still, Stoker seems to lose the plot when his novel becomes an action story. What I loved about the first half is his ability to capture the horror of vampirism, and the horror of accepting its reality. I was losing my mind for this book when we started this process. Now, I think that excitement has led to perhaps too harsh a judgment on the end, which simply does not live up. This is a fairly common problem in horror. The pay-off rarely lives up to the premise, the world building, the character development, and the conflict. That said, why the hell was Dracula not allowed his due?

I was quite ready a week or two ago to anoint Dracula the status of my favorite vampire novel. But as it stands, well, that honor still sits with I Am Legend.

What did you think, Catherine and Andrew? Am I being too let down by what is, in all reality, still a really excellent novel?

Andrew: I don’t think you’re being too let down. I’ve made no secret of my frustration with this novel, and I, like you, found the end of the book underwhelming and anticlimactic. My reasons are somewhat different than yours, Chris, though I think that you might agree in part with my argument: as is so often the case with horror stories, the best part of this novel is the monster. When Dracula is around and allowed to wield his deadly, creepy charisma on those around him, the novel soars. But when he’s not in the scene and the focus shifts to the men and women who chase him, the narrative drags. The good guys are boring.

Simply put: Count Dracula is Bram Stoker’s most enduring creation. He’s a character so alive, so charismatic, so fascinating and repulsive at once, that it’s hard to notice until about halfway through that the story he’s trapped in is fairly mediocre: too long by a hundred pages at least, largely barren of incident, and, with a few notable exceptions scattered here and there, dramatically inert.

Allow me to gripe for just a moment: this novel is so, so, so SLOOOOOW. As I kept on reading toward the end, I waited for the elements of the plot to click into place, characters to begin moving in the same direction, and for the forward momentum to pick up. But it just never happened. Yes, our intrepid band of vampire hunters do chase Dracula back to his home in Transylvania. But it’s a “chase” best put in scare-quotes, because it is a pursuit without any semblance of velocity, excitement, or suspense. I mean, let’s just look at some of the elements of the vampire hunters’ search for the monster, shall we? To begin with, there are several weeks of waiting for a boat to arrive, for starters, and wondering when the boat will arrive, and speculating that it might arrive soon. There’s the daily hypnotism of Mina, during which she says basically the same thing every time. And there are characters constantly writing in their journals that they are “in God’s hands now” or “in the hands of God.” This is all very tedious, and by the time the climactic action did arrive, I was ready for the book to be over.

And yes, admittedly, this was 1897, when books tended to be a little longer and less suspenseful than what we’re used to now—but even so, I can name no less than a dozen suspense novels that came out at roughly the same time or earlier and were much more densely plotted. By this time, Arthur Conan Doyle had published two Sherlock Holmes novels that were shorter and much more suspenseful; there are also comparisons to be made with the adventure novels and stories of Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, and H.G. Wells. These writers are hardly Dan Brown, but they all made better use of suspense and narrative momentum than does Stoker in Dracula. (I’d particularly highlight Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde as a better, more readable, and just as interesting dramatization of late-Victorian values versus monstrosity.)

The two best things about Bram Stoker’s Dracula are the Count himself and Stoker’s ability to create a creepy atmosphere. Yet the book itself focuses on scenes and situations that largely do not allow these two strengths to shine. The fact that the novel was still a success in spite of this I’d chalk up to the unbelievable strength of the monster and of those scenes that do work. Dracula and the early scenes in his castle are so good that it somehow manages to drag the whole creaking shambles of the rest of the book just above mediocrity.

The two great horror novels of the 19th century are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Frankenstein is the better novel by far—yet Stoker’s is the better monster. Stoker’s contribution to the tradition is no small one. He created a fantastic monster in a less-than-fantastic novel, true—yet many horror writers don’t even get that far. It’s no mean feat to write a character so eerily fascinating that he becomes the fertile ground for an entire genre tradition.

Mary Shelley wrote one of the best horror novels of all time. Stoker created an amazing monster in a just-OK novel. One is a triumph of artistry, the other of influence. I’d call it a tie, I guess.

Catherine: The ending was a bit odd but it didn’t let me down. This in large part due to Mina who I fell in love with in this last part. I mean, c’mon! She’s turning into a vampire wife during a snowstorm but she still manages to protect Van Helsing. The vampire wives get the best scenes, like during Lucy’s attack and then when Van Helsing stakes the wives and this was another good one. This time the snow is falling and Mina is slowly turning into a vampire while the wind is haunted by menace (aka vampires). This is the final great scene of the book. I saw it happening in my mind’s eye and I was deliciously freaked out particularly when she said to Van Helsing, “It is for you that I fear!” whereat she laughed- a laugh, low and unreal, and said:- “Fear for me! Why fear for me? None safer in all the world from them than I am.” What a line. Mina rules them all at this point. Not only is she one of them but she still manages to protect Van Helsing against all the odds.

The ending itself was a let down with Dracula turning into dust without a fight. But within the particular universe this book inhabits, Dracula was already defeated before the end due to the group’s reliance and trust in God. The references to God and Scripture get hot and heavy in the last section. No one gets cocky and arrogant. Oh no. They all fling themselves on the mercy of God and Mina’s Dracula radar (which is also God’s providence. somehow.)

And it’s Renfield who signals the end for Dracula. When Dracula finally visits him at the asylum, he offers Renfield his heart’s desire: “All these lives will I give you, ay, and many more and greater, through countless ages, if you will fall down and worship me!” The last line, “if you fall down and worship me,” is taken verbatim from the Temptation of Christ when the devil offers Christ everything if he will fall down and worship him. Renfield resists and this is the first time that anyone under Dracula’s control refuses him. Even though Mina is attacked shortly after Renfield’s refusal, it is her link to Dracula that enables them to defeat the vampires. She, like Renfield, resists Dracula’s dehumanizing call and does not kill Van Helsing when she more than certainly could.

Unfortunately, the characters’ religion, instead of making them psychologically complex and interesting, only makes them more boring. And this is fatal when followed by a very slow chase scene. But let’s remember, the Victorians didn’t have cars. Bicycles were the hot new thing to have and trains went a thrilling 30 mph. This was a culture that was slow and so, of course a chase scene would be slow. It’s true that Arthur Conan Doyle did have tighter plots that moved along but Holmes stories still drag all over the place. Victorians hadn’t mastered how to clip a story along (as suspenseful as Dickens can be, he’s anything but quick) but they certainly ushered in the next era of tightly plotted stories.

I agree with you, Andrew, that Frankenstein is the better story. But it’s also far more boring. Not much happens except people moaning and groaning and monologuing. Terrible exciting things may happen but everything is overshadowed by endless guilt and page long speeches on existential pain. For all its faults, Dracula doesn’t linger on self-inflicted guilt, there are no monologues only dialogues, and the speeches never exceed beyond half a page.

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