The feelings of the hunter: ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker – Book Recommendation
Dracula is such a cultural phenomenon that he barely requires introduction. Nevertheless, like Nosferatu ’s Count Orlok (based, of course, on Stoker’s creation), the Dracula of the novel is not the sympathetic, humanised character of many recent renderings within the vampire genre. What struck me in reading the original work is that the Count himself doesn’t actually appear that much. He instead represents a looming, direful manifestation of Victorian fears that into their ordered world of cutting-edge technology, geopolitical dominance, and Christian values there might intrude a primitive, alien force seeking to destabilise, or even conquer, all that they have built. Simultaneously primeval and cunning, the Count stealthily conceals his savage and depraved appetites, and it is his physical absence and the concurrent growing evidence of his presence that conspire to generate a sense of terror in the novel. What Stoker’s work largely portrays, via the letters and journals through which ...
