24 October 2008

Dracula -- Bram Stoker



I think Dracula is one of those stories that everyone thinks they know or do know to some extent, but rarely they have read the actual book. At least, this was my case up until now. I have finally actually read this one. It was very good too. It is, however, written in a strange style. That is, the entire book is in the form of diaries or correspondences. Thus, there is no omnipresent narrator and so the information available to the reader is somewhat limited. Not really that this is a good nor bad thing, basically it just is different.

I very much enjoyed the story and I thought it took just the right amount of time to tell the story. There were some seemingly superfluous parts with people speaking in strange local dialects that were unnecessary to some degree. But, all in all, it was quite a good read. I wouldn't really call it "scary", but then again not much really is scary to me. It was written in the 19th century so that scary and today's scary are often very different. I do recommend it though to anyone, it is a quick read because of the style and it is relatively short at only 400 pages.