Dracula reviewed

A few things before we begin about the picture above. Yes, this is the version that I read. No, this is not a graphic novel retelling the story. Yes, there are pictures and I will talk about them in time. No, none of the pictures in the book are as gay as the cover is. With that out of the way, let's begin.

The first thing that surprised me was the style. It kind of reminded of the surprise I got when I saw The Fly...the one with Vincent Price. I know this is kind of a weird tangent but let me explain. When I saw The Fly I was expecting a low-brow sci-fi horror movie. What I got was something that was akin to a psychological noir that focused on the how's of The Fly rather than "Look, here's a human with a fly's head....aaahhh". So in regards to that, I was expecting Dracula to be told straight in some archaic langauge that would be hard to decifer and then I would finish the book and burn it out of anger. Well there's old school grammar and obsolete words but it's not terribly hard to understand. It's also not told straight like how we're used to seeing a novel written. It's entirely written using journal and diary entries, newspapers clippings & telegrams. It makes it a more realistic, experience than just a straight-up story would have provided.

I'm not going to bore with you the whats of the story cause you should know them by now except sunlight doesn't kill the vampires in this. It weakens them quite a bit but come on, this was the first few vampire books. It just makes me wonder how we go from that to sunlight flat out kills vampires, oh well. There's a couple set pieces that are quite the page-turners like the saga with Lucy and the chase back to Castle Dracula. It does make wonderful reading BUT at times the pace is a bit slow and since the big twists in the story are basically in the "It was his sled" territory so it's a bit rough to read parts of the story that you already know what's going to happen in some obvoius way(I'm looking at you Chapter 1).

Now the pictures...they are quite striking. The fear of something like that it's more of a gimmick and it would detract from the story. But the pictures here compliment the story in a wildly successful way. The pictures have a nice use of shadows and lights. And yeah, they're awesome, that's all.

8/10