I just had to read the source, or rather one of the main sources, that gave birth to the vampire genre. As a long time fan of the movie, I was excited about this book. Reading it, however, was less exciting. First though, I'll talk about what I liked. This novel is told from many perspectives, which I loved. Stoker uses diaries, memos, newspaper articles, and letters to piece together the narrative. It's brilliant, well, mostly. Like those shaky video cam movies where supposedly "lost footage" is found and edited together for the audience, some of the things recorded and how they are recorded are too convenient and rushed. But for the most part, it's a great way of telling this story and it also gives you an intimate glimpse into each of the major characters. You really start to understand and care for them. Unfortunately, that's also a disadvantage.

We never get to really "meet" Dracula. We see him as the other characters see him, but we don't understand him or why he is what he is, and how he feels about it. The movie is superior in that regard. Another thing that puts a barrier between the reader and the story is the language. It's written in very old English. But even Shakespeare knew how to talk *to* people and not at them. The Van Helsing character, in particular, comes across as very pretentious and unrealistic in his speech. He's a philosopher, but you have to really read his parts more than once to truly digest it, and it's difficult to believe that the people he's interacting with understand him so easily. But maybe that was just me.

Besides that, the descriptions were very good, although sometimes the language was repetitive. Some of the characters' reactions didn't ring very realistic to me. I also had an an issue with the way the author discusses masculinity and femininity, it was annoying and pronounced enough to make me roll my eyes more than once. Looking past that though, the plot was fairly engaging, there's a lot going on. The suspense about where it is all heading was gripping up until the end. Unfortunately, for me, the climax did not justify the build-up. I expected a lot more, and was disappointed about how quickly everything ended.
I just had to read the source, or rather one of the main sources, that gave birth to the vampire genre. As a long time fan of the movie, I was excited about this book. Reading it, however, was less exciting. First though, I'll talk about what I liked. This novel is told from many perspectives, which I loved. Stoker uses diaries, memos, newspaper articles, and letters to piece together the narrative. It's brilliant, well, mostly. Like those shaky video cam movies where supposedly "lost footage" is found and edited together for the audience, some of the things recorded and how they are recorded are too convenient and rushed. But for the most part, it's a great way of telling this story and it also gives you an intimate glimpse into each of the major characters. You really start to understand and care for them. Unfortunately, that's also a disadvantage. We never get to really "meet" Dracula. We see him as the other characters see him, but we don't understand him or why he is what he is, and how he feels about it. The movie is superior in that regard. Another thing that puts a barrier between the reader and the story is the language. It's written in very old English. But even Shakespeare knew how to talk *to* people and not at them. The Van Helsing character, in particular, comes across as very pretentious and unrealistic in his speech. He's a philosopher, but you have to really read his parts more than once to truly digest it, and it's difficult to believe that the people he's interacting with understand him so easily. But maybe that was just me. Besides that, the descriptions were very good, although sometimes the language was repetitive. Some of the characters' reactions didn't ring very realistic to me. I also had an an issue with the way the author discusses masculinity and femininity, it was annoying and pronounced enough to make me roll my eyes more than once. Looking past that though, the plot was fairly engaging, there's a lot going on. The suspense about where it is all heading was gripping up until the end. Unfortunately, for me, the climax did not justify the build-up. I expected a lot more, and was disappointed about how quickly everything ended.