This months’ review comes from my eldest son again! He read this novel, loved it, and decided (on his own) to review it for me… just in case I needed another review… which I did! This story holds a special place in my heart, as I was Mina in the Neil Simon comedy version “Dracula: the Musical?” in high school. Let’s hear from my son:

The Ballad of Your Vampirization!

Imagine, you are in your bedroom. Your surroundings are dark and shadowed, though not shapeless because of the moonlight beaming through the crack in the curtain. You toss and turn under your quilt, unable to sleep. Rising out of bed, you walk around a bit and automatically glance towards the curtained window. Drawing back the curtains you see the road and lawn as motionless, excepting a deer or racoon crossing it, in the beams of the full moon. A mist is crawling up your yard and everywhere else near here. Suddenly, something peculiar happens: Part of the mist groups together into the form of what reminds you of an old, slender, tall man. For a moment, it’s just fog, until, hauntily, the silhouette materializes into a flesh and blood man. With black attire and mustache, yet contrasting pale white skin, the mysterious phantom unexpectedly turns towards your bedroom window. You fling the curtains back where no light can slip in and rush in your bed, covering yourself all up to your nose with your blankets. Then, the most teeth-grinding, nail-bighting, shiver-worthy thing, happens! The shape of the man walks into your room, through the wall! He smiles wickedly, canines glinting as the curtains flew open with his entrance. While he walks over to your bed, you let out a noiseless scream. He laughs, your blood curdling, at your terror. Right when you think of escaping, the icy fingers clamp your shoulders, pulling you closer to himself. Smiling, he places his teeth against your neck, holding you fast, and begins to suck your blood as his feast! Throwing you down on the floor, weak and helpless, he vaporizes into the air, now looking younger. A few mornings later, a friend finds you lying on the floor, pale and unable to move or speak. The friend rushes you to a doctor, only to be too late. You died on the way to the doctor’s. Now, unless someone wise and intelligent enters your grave and kills your vampire-self (i.e. staking your organ heart and slicing your head from the rest of your blood-craving body), you will stay Undead, a vampire, for the rest of your bloody life!

This book was the second horror classic I have read (After The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert L. Stevenson) and it was most definitely a long one, though, I loved it and even decided to have it as my 14th birthday party theme. Boasting almost 400 pages of terror, this book entails climax after climax, urging you to read on. With great descriptions, some large vocabulary, and ‘enfrightenment’ all together, this classic is very well written (Bram Stoker). Set in 19th century Europe, this novel is written as if from journals by the main characters of this book. There are other ways Stoker likes to piece the mystery together including newspaper clippings, letters, telegraph messages, phonograph journal entries, and memorandums. Jumping around at different points of time and separate entries, it is a little confusing at first. Having younger siblings, I would not recommend reading aloud this book to smaller children, probably alright for older ones, but totally depending on personality and your decision or a parent. Several plays were made directly after the publication of Dracula and also many movies, including a silent film titled Nosferatu, published in 1922, directed by F.W. Murnau, and probably the truest to Bram Stoker’s work. Another, published in 1931, was directed by Tod Browning and starred by Bela Lugosi. Many Dracula movies were published in the mid-20^th century, and mostly B-Rated movies. Though, in the late 1900s, Francis Ford Coppola directed a movie well made, starring Gary Oldman, and published in 1992.

            Our story begins with Jonathan Harker (engaged with Mina Murray) attempting to sell Count Dracula, himself, an abbey in London. But midway through his visit to Dracula, Jonathan finds things that are very peculiar with the castle, Dracula, the rooms, etc. Enough findings that Harker realizes he is being held prisoner by Count Dracula! Thankfully, we later find out that Jonathan escapes from his imprisonment, but only after partly losing his mind. Our story shifts, after a climax, over to Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra (Arhtur Holmwood’s love) as they, very good friends, are together at the Westenra house, with Mrs. Westenra gravely ill. Sleepwalking, Lucy finds herself, unbeknown to all but an old, secretive doctor, fanged by Dracula, in her slumber (though everyone thinks it was a pin puncture). After many hard weeks of fighting the unknown illness of Lucy, Lucy perishes from being a human but roams the nights through town, deceivingly luring little children into her clutches by darkness, as a vampire! Later, Lucy, the vampire, was, thankfully, eternally killed by her lover, saving her soul. Weeks pass, and Dr. Seward (owning and running a sanitarium), Dr. Van Helsing (the older doctor called to Lucy’s illness), Jonathan and Mina Harker (now married), Arthur Holmwood (Lucy’s love), and a friend of Arthur/Lord Godalming, Quiency Morris, all group in Dr. Seward’s house to put their journals together and type them out in date order, to solve the mystery. Along the way Mina is also bitten by Dacula, in a special, and Dracula whispered as he vanished out the window that Mina would be a special vampire to him: a sidekick. Growing colder, now in November, the group can now pursue Dracula with Mina, able to see what Dracula sees, through telepathic connections (but Dracula can also see where Mina is too). When they arrive at a ‘fork in the road’, they split up into pairs, Jonathan with Arthur on a boat, Dr. Seward with Quincey Morris on horse, and Dr. Van Helsing with Mina, growing vampirish every day, by carriage, ‘unvampirizing’ the three women vampires at Dracula’s castle. Eventually, the team find themselves all in the same location, right next to Dracula’s home, and the sunset (the time Dracula becomes the most powerful) comes on quickly. With using the same treatment as vampire Lucy…    “As I looked, the eyes (of Dracula) saw the sinking sun and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But, on the instant, came the sweep and the flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart. It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there. The Castle Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the setting sun.”-Mina Harker’s journal, pg. 398   …and Dracula’s soul is saved, thanks to all the hard, brave, and persevering work of Jonathan and Mina Harker, Arthur Holmwood, Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing, and the deceased Texan, Quincey Morris.