137. (September 2024) Dracula, by Bram Stoker — The Tabletop Roleplayers' Book Club

Dracula Q5: Role of women

NeilNjae — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 16:37:59 +0000

Mina is a fairly active character in the book. She does her wifely duty to support Jonathan, but also does a lot to organise the information available to the characters, and does her best to stand up to Dracula's corruption. At the same time, she is kept away from the action. What do you think of this treatment of women?

Dracula Q4: Structure and style

NeilNjae — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 16:37:39 +0000

Dracula is undenyable scary. How much of that is down to the structure of the book, being told as a series of partial letters and memoirs. The ordering of them into a single timeline has a diagetic explanation (Mina's organisation), but would the book have worked as well without the interleaving of the different accounts in the book?

Do you think the story would have been as scary if it had been told through the voice of an omniscient narrator? Did the partial recounts of the different characters add to the fear?

Dracula Q1: Dracula then and now

NeilNjae — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 16:33:02 +0000

This book arguably defined many of the tropes of the modern vampire story. But that was over 125 years ago, and a lot has changed in the media landscape since then. from Stoker's unknown and unknowable predator, through the angsty souls of Anne Rice, to the sparkly love interest of Twilight.

There are a couple of issues here to unpack, I think. One is that the tropes have been used and reused over time, and have by necessity been re-interpreted by a variety of story-tellers. The other is that our perceptions of vampires has perhaps changed due to familarity with those tropes. If we all know how vampires are "supposed" to behave, they lose some of their power to be frightening, becoming something familiar if still a little transgressive.

Is Dracula still scary now, or is it a worn-out empty cliche? What would you do to make Dracula (and vampires) scary again?

Dracula Q7: The characters

NeilNjae — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 16:49:25 +0000

There are many characters with significant spotlight time in the book. How well are they portrayed? Do their different voices come through?

What did you think of Lucy's fate, and was her death meaningful? Were you, like me, intensely annoyed with van Helsing's pomposity and verbosity? (I skipped several of his extended pontifications.)

Dracula Q6: Setting details

NeilNjae — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 16:38:15 +0000

Dracula was written and set in the 1890s, so wasn't a period piece. But we're not in that time, so we read it as such. What is distinct about the 1890s that makes you aware it's a different time?

For me, it's the frequent post, and the rather matter-of-fact acceptance of the deaths of Lucy and her mother.

Four of the five characters were definitely middle-class, with one (Holmwood) an aristocrat. Is this an aspirational book, or was it written for a middle-class audience?

Dracula Q3: Garden of Eden

NeilNjae — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 16:33:56 +0000

To my mind, the story has elements of the Garden of Eden. The great tempter, associated with sin and sex, comes to the women and they fall from grace. The corrupted women in turn attempt to spread the corruption to their men. But in this version, the men draw strength and wisdom from knowledge, in the form of the "archangel" van Helsing, and defeat the tempter and remain in the blessed land.

What do you think of this reading?

If man's knowledge is usurping the position of God in this story, what does it say about the place of the divine in the world of the book? Contrast this with the powerful Christian ideas throughout the book. And compare this to the deus ex machina of War of the Worlds, where God's protection is replaced by science (in the form of germs) (and the 1950s American film where God is God, and Independence Day where people are God, creating the computer virus).

Could (or should) you include such large, thematic underpinnings in your own RPG situations?

Dracula Q2: Christianity and colonialism

NeilNjae — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 16:33:38 +0000

Christianity is embedded deeply in the fabric of the book. Dracula is held back by crucifixes, his soil destroyed by holy water. Mina is marked by the communion wafer. Dracula lives in Transylvania, a region described as "backwards" and superstitous, heavily pagan. Similarly, the heros of the book are upright Christian men, coming to spread the power of God and Empire to these heathen abberations.

Did the Christian overtones in the book bother you? Did you notice them? How should, or could, Dracula be retold in a more secular age?

About Bram Stoker

RichardAbbott — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 19:02:43 +0000

Abraham (Bram) Stoker was an Irish writer, best known for his Gothic classic Dracula, which continues to influence horror writers and fans more than 100 years after it was first published. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, in science, mathematics, oratory, history, and composition, Stoker' s writing was greatly influenced by his father' s interest in theatre and his mother' s gruesome stories about her childhood during the cholera epidemic in 1832. Although a published author of the novels Dracula, The Lady of the Shroud, and The Lair of the White Worm, and his work as part of the literary staff of The London Daily Telegraph, Stoker made his living as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and the business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. Stoker died in 1912, leaving behind one of the most memorable horror characters ever created.

Cover blurb for Dracula

RichardAbbott — Sun, 18 Aug 2024 19:01:52 +0000

Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist, but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, hunt Dracula and, in the end, kill him.

Dracula was mostly written in the 1890s. Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes for the novel, drawing extensively from Transylvanian folklore and history. Some scholars have suggested that the character of Dracula was inspired by historical figures like the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler or the countess Elizabeth Báthory, but there is widespread disagreement. Stoker's notes mention neither figure. He found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while holidaying there, picking it because he thought it meant devil in Romanian.