Opinions on Dracula by Bram Stoker?

[Druidic]

I remember Michael Shea loving J. Ramsey Campbell's The Inhabitant of the Lake and saying he refused to regard those stories as juvenile, he liked them too much. He found them delightful.

We all have guilty pleasures. Mine is The Lair of the White Worm. I've indulged that pleasure several times over a half century. It reads like an "evil fairy tale" written by a child; and, to hell with the execution, Stoker's imagination was too wonderful to quibble over the book's obvious failings. To call it the "worst horror novel ever written" as a critic once did, is a hoot. He must have mercifully missed the ton of crap released in the 70's and 80's.

The Pauline Coleman Smith (do I have her name right, she did the Tarot with Waite) illustrations in the original were utterly charming.

I like the manic Ken Russell film:

Dan Ireland on The Lair of the White Worm - YouTube

Somewhat of a minor classic for me apart from the poorly done ending, which unfortunately lets down an otherwise wonderful piece of work – provided you enjoy camp.

[Druidic]

Another Stoker classic: It gets off to a slow start but Jewel of Seven Stars is a fine novel. My favorite Mummy tale.

Stoker also wrote a couple of classic short horror stories--"The Squaw" and "The Judge's House." I've always wondered if Lovecraft was influenced by the latter when he wrote his own Witch-House.

[Hidden X]

For those wishing to develop proper understanding and appreciation of Dracula, David J. Skal's recent mammoth biography of Stoker makes for some great reading:

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(as long as you have a fair amount of free time to spare, that is)

[Zaharoff]

Quote Originally Posted by Hidden X

For those wishing to develop proper understanding and appreciation of Dracula, David J. Skal's recent mammoth biography of Stoker makes for some great reading: (as long as you have a fair amount of free time to spare, that is)

Not mentioned here at TLO, but Mr. Skal died last month.
Brian Showers wrote a lovely tribute to the man.
Remembering David J. Skal | Swan River Press

	TLO THOMAS LIGOTTI ONLINE

[brendanconnell]

I didnt see any repressed sexuality or fear of immigration in Dracula. It is an excellent book. Maybe people are reading too much into it, instead of just enjoying it as a good, well-written story?

[matt cardin]

Quote Originally Posted by brendanconnell

I didnt see any repressed sexuality or fear of immigration in Dracula. It is an excellent book. Maybe people are reading too much into it, instead of just enjoying it as a good, well-written story?

Here's a 2006 paper that comments critically on the veritable obsession with sexuality in a multitude of critical readings of Dracula:

Coitus Interruptus: Sex, Bram Stoker, and Dracula

Here's a 2014 article that talks about both the sexual and the immigration angles, by a literary curator at the British Library:

Dracula: Vampires, Perversity, and Victorian Anxieties

If you look up any bibliography of Dracula or Stoker scholarship, you'll find veritable galaxies of books, articles, essays, and papers, the majority of them focusing to some degree (and some of them almost entirely) on sex and/or fear of foreigners and immigrants.

Much of the horror of Dracula comes from the prospect of the immortal soul of the innocent being forever tainted by evil, which is a prospect many in today's world would lack either the imagination or the sensitivity to understand.

[Karnos]

Dracula was the second book I read in my life, right after finishing Jules Verne's "Voyage to the center of the Earth". I don't hold too many impressions about it; I had just begun reading for pleasure, so my taste and judgement was infantile to what it is today. I suppose these days I would be more strict with it, I've recently even thought about re-reading it, maybe some fancy annotated edition, and in English, seeing as how my first read was a Spanish translation.

I do remember enjoying it a lot. I also remember skipping the last ten or so pages to be over with it and start a new book. I vaguely remember the ending being a big abrupt too, but then again, it's just an unreliable memory.

[paeng]

I used the ff. for a Gothic Lit class (one novel or collection of stories a week) because they were the ones that were surely available in print form locally with public domain e-text backups online:

The Gothic and Fantasy 1: “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “William Wilson,” “The Black Cat,” “Ligeia,” “The Premature Burial,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum” by Edgar Allan Poe

The Gothic and Fantasy 2: “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” “The Gray Champion,” “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Minister’s Black Veil,” “The Birthmark,” “The Celestial Railroad,” “An Artist of the Beautiful,” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Gothic and Fantasy 3: “The Colour Out of Space,” “The Call of Cthulhu,” “The Dunwich Horror,” “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” and “At the Mountains of Madness” by H.P. Lovecraft

The Gothic and the Psyche 1: R.L. Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The Gothic and the Psyche 2: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Gothic and the Psyche 3: Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw

The Gothic and Forbidden Knowledge 1: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

The Gothic and Forbidden Knowledge 2: H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau

The Gothic and Forbidden Knowledge 3: Bram Stoker’s Dracula

The Gothic Anti-Hero 1: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

The Gothic Anti-Hero 2: Faust (Part I) by J.W. von Goethe

The Gothic Anti-Hero 3: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

then mixed them with excerpts from media (such as clips from film versions).

I did not have much to say about Dracula in terms of philosophical musings (I recall focusing on the few things that Dracula says), but it was one of the easiest to read in the list, and it has lots of media references.