Review: Dracul

Dracul by Dacre Stoker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Um, guys?

I don't know what I just read.

Blurb: Mysterious happenings throughout Bram Stoker's early years were the inspiration for Dracula, the greatest vampire novel of all time. This is that origin story.

Story: Vampires, ghouls, zombies, apparitions, blood and gore, general impossibilities.

Author's Note: This all actually happened.

Me: 0.0

If we're calling this a true story it's a solid 5 stars just for its WTF level.

BUT!

If we're sticking with this being a vampire story inspired by the mystery of Stoker's inspiration for Dracula, I think we're dealing overall with a pretty mediocre offering.

But I am honestly SO CONFUSED.

I feel like this would have been better as a non-fiction exploration of Bram Stoker's madness, or reasons why he may have seemed mad when perfectly sane. Because apparently Stoker originally wanted to publish Dracula as non-fiction? Like he actually believed the vampire story he wrote was legit?

So that kinda fascinates me, and I would have loved to take a look at that, kinda muse over 'well there are weird people who call themselves vampires in today's society and drink each others blood' etc.

Instead, this is the supposed 102 missing pages from the start of the first edition of Dracula. So it's basically a prequel to the vampire story we know and love, featuring the author and his family as its main characters.

That's cool. Stephen King has written himself into works of fiction, no big. Clever, really.

But you want me to believe this happened for real?

I mean, if you're gonna convince me this was legit happenings I need more facts so I can get my science brain onto it please.

I'm actually really torn over whether to review it for the story itself or review based on 'am I convinced it was real?'

I guess both?

I mean, the story was decent. It was a bit of a slow start, but it started to get creepy about 100 pages in and then got nice and chaotic with violence and snakes (I love snakes) and obviously typical vampiric behaviours. The dynamic between the characters was fantastic, and I loved the relationship between the three siblings. Towards the end of the novel I found it really hard to put down. But with Dracula having been around for so long and having spawned so many other vampire novels, the formula is kind of tired. Slight creepiness of people not aging, appearing and disappearing, healing fast and heightened senses? Standard. Stalking the evil during daylight hours? Standard. Garlic and wooden stakes and silver crosses? Standard. As far as vampire stories go, there's really nothing all that new here.

The book's strongest appeal is in that possibility that there WERE mysterious, unexplained happenings. But there's no mystery here. It's all written out into a story, through journal entries and letters etc. But even there I struggled because there's mixed tenses. For example, one entry begins with (paraphrasing here) 'I am sitting here at this time writing these events' and then later says 'there is [something] (which I was later to discover was called [something] ...' and how can you write about later if later hasn't happened yet? So clearly this was a fabrication?

Honestly I just cannot wrap my head around this, but I find it very hard to believe this story to be an account of true events.

I think I'm just going to leave it be.

Overall, an interesting but average vampire story with great characters.

I recommend NOT reading the Author's Note.

And if anyone can shed more light on this for me or share theories or knowledge, PLEASE HELP.

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