Dracula

Once in a while, I come across a work of fiction that should be better than it is, and unfortunately Bram Stoker’s Dracula fits firmly into that category. The premise carries the novel through, and the story does have some strong points, but Stoker does a couple of things that undermine the whole work.

The first major problem is that Stoker wrote this as an epistolary novel. I believe this style used to be much more common than it is now, but was already long past its prime when Stoker wrote Dracula, and good riddance. Ideally, the epistolary style adds a sense of realism, making the reader feel like he’s a researcher going through primary documents, rather than reading an artificially constructed narrative. Since much of Dracula is essentially a mystery story, this approach does serve the plot well. However, I found the constant changes in narrator, and the changes in tone, setting, and style that accompanied that, distracting, and it made the novel more difficult to get into. Also, the epistolary style doesn’t do as good a job of conveying action as a basic third-person narration, and overall the novel may have been better if Stoker had simply used the third-person omniscient narrator.