Scott Graham

The story of an everyman who died and is condemmed to a short stay in hell. Short = not infinite. Hell is a library that contains, somewhere in its stacks, the perfect story of your life. It is housed there, along with every other book that could have possibly been printed with no regard to rhyme or reason. Any combination of the characters in the Roman alphabet, grammar and actual words not required. Your task is to find the book of your life, at which point you get sent to paradise.

You leave your time reading this book with a infinitesimal understanding of the time frames of infinity and forever, and it is frightening.

The classic tale of vampires and staunch heroes lives up to its reputation as the progenitor of modern vampire lore, with sunrise and sunset, garlic, stabbing through the heart and beheading, and permission to enter a home required, all figuring into the story prominently. The story is generally easy to follow despite its Victorian prose, save for the pieces authored by Van Helsing. Stoker made his Netherlander understanding of the English language variably stilted, so a careful and close reading was warranted in those passages. Oddly, Dracula does not appear in the action too often once he has left Castle Dracula; he is felt mostly through his effects on the other characters, most notably Renfield, Lucy, and Mina, hardly a fitting role for Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, or Gary Oldman. Except for the final chase, the story is more drawing room drama than horror story, and even that is mostly told from the point of view from the intercepting party rather than the pursuing parties. Overall I am very glad to have read it and be able to judge the adaptations against the source material and appreciate them all the more for the literary license taken by each. The tone most closely matches the Lugosi movie, but the story is very faithfully reproduced by Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation.