Reviews tagging 'Self harm'

Dracula by Bram Stoker

10 reviews

akgeekgirl's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0


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riverofhorton's review against another edition

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adventurous dark hopeful inspiring mysterious sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. The world-building was incredible, and all but one of the main group were fully fleshed out characters. The only things that let it down were poo Quincey, the language of Van Helsing being a slog to get through, and the repetition of a lot of the bits of lore. Four times we're told that Dracula can't cross running water, three times that killing Dracula will stop the transformation of any vampires that are somewhere between human and vampire, three times we're told that communion wafers act as a talisman against the vampires, plus a few others that I could mention. I wonder how long this book would be without these instances of repetition. I particularly enjoyed reading the letters between Mina and Lucy, and their respective journal entries about the other: Mina is definitely gay for Lucy, and I can see no other explanation for the way she talks of and to Lucy. I would like to have seen some more expression of that love, but I get that wasn't really possible when this was published, sadly.

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michad's review against another edition

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adventurous dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.25

Enjoyable but so wordy. The trope of stupid characters in horror seems to spring from this. 

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utopiaandmelancholy's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

I picked this up mainly as foundational text of most vampire media. There was a great deal more religious content than I was expecting, weirdly, but equally more slightly ridiculous shenanigans. Overall, it was a decent story, and I'm glad to have read it.   

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jneverland's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75


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aardwyrm's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious reflective tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

It's. The one with Dracula. 

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1quillb's review against another edition

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challenging dark slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

1.0

First of all, I’m very disappointed that Dracula only showed up on probably 40 pages out of the 400 in my book. But to be fair, on most of those other pages absolutely nothing happened. And second of all, that ending? Did he run out of pages and just word-vomit onto the page to meet the deadline?
So, with full and complete offence meant to Abraham “Bram” Stoker: this book sucked. Horribly.
I’m not entirely sure what happened in it, to be honest. Jonathan goes to Dracula’s castle and gets trapped there. A man called Renfield eats spiders but really wants to eat a cat. Mina sits in a churchyard with her girlfriend Lucy. Lucy gets proposed to three times by men she’d literally spoken to one time… it was just random plot point after random plot point, none of which made sense in any sort of context.
And the entire second-half of the book was devoted to… you guess it, absolutely nothing! They decide that vampires are indeed real (though it takes them some time to come to that conclusion even after they see one), and then they go to Dracula’s castle. Why? I don’t know. Dracula wasn’t even there.
Then, for about the last ten pages of the novel, they have a metaphorical snowball fight and start stabbing random Romanians. Obviously the Romanians lost, because they were exhausted from spending the last dozen hours carrying Dracula’s coffin up the mountainside because the Count was too lazy to walk. But luckily “he” dies!
Who is “he”, you may ask? Apparently, it’s Dracula, because later on the characters rejoice in the fact that they killed the vampire, but Bram literally didn’t even write that it was Dracula who died. Nor did he specify if it was Jonathan or Morris who was stabbed by a Romanian. Only in the epilogue is it made clear (a dead man can’t have children, I don’t think).

Overall, this was terrible. I’ve not read anything else by Stoker, so I don’t know if this hideous novel was just a one-off or if it’s actually how he writes, but it sucked regardless. Highly don’t recommend. 

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roaze's review against another edition

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dark mysterious slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

2.5


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kstericker's review against another edition

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adventurous dark tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

4.0


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thevampiremars's review against another edition

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adventurous dark hopeful mysterious sad tense medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

If Dracula had ended after chapter four, I might have given it a full five stars. The first fifty-odd pages are undoubtedly the best part of the book. Jonathan Harker is trapped in Dracula’s castle, and slowly realising that he is trapped. The atmosphere is tense and eerie. Both Harker and Dracula are interesting and well-developed characters, and the interactions between them are great.

I want to talk for a moment about Count Dracula specifically. In the first four chapters he is depicted as (seemingly) kind, hospitable, careful, and emotionally intelligent, but there’s something sinister about him too. There’s also quite a bit of queer subtext. Dracula is a complicated and sympathetic character at this point, but later his characterisation changes drastically and he ends up being reduced to a cartoonish villain with very little depth. He also becomes a much less prominent part of the narrative – he’s not entirely absent, but he takes on more of a peripheral role. I wish we’d seen more of him. (Interestingly, this is the exact reverse of my view regarding Frankenstein’s monster)

Of course, I must address the elephant in the room – the bigotry. Dracula is a character crafted from several antisemitic tropes. His hooked nose is emphasised many times, and there are parallels between his vampirism (specifically his preying on children) and blood libel. Something else that stands out when viewing the character through this lens is the way he is presented as both an immensely powerful mastermind and a weakling with a “child-brain” – proto-fascist rhetoric, perhaps? The book as a whole is riddled with xenophobia, racism, ableism, and sexism. In many ways it’s a product of its time. Its age doesn’t excuse these problematic elements, but it does offer some context at least.

I was led to believe that Dracula is slow-paced but for a gothic horror story it’s actually very quick. It’s relatively well-written, and the epistolary format is executed well. Excellent build-up to an anticlimactic ending. There’s so much more I could say about the characters and the story (both praise and criticism) but I think I’ll wrap things up here.

Overall I did enjoy Dracula and I’m glad I finally sat down and read it. It’s certainly not without its flaws but I think it’s worth reading if you haven’t already.

“The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me, with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.” 

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