This
isn't exactly a review, but I'm tagging it under that anyway for easy finding
purposes. Imagine a world in which Bram Stoker had an editor.
I appreciate that novels written for serialization tend to run longer. (Though not all parts were serialized.) This is the common problem WIP fanficcers face, right? And it’s why a lot off high schools let out pained wails at having to read another Dickens novel. But at the same time, I’ve read Dickens and women’s epistolary fiction, which can be just as obsessed with minutia.
I don’t quibble with the epistolary/found document form, and I might even argue that some of our common forms make the effort to do something quite like what epistolary does, without much effort of pretense. So many found footage movies, especially in horror. Lots of rotating POVs in novels. Some mad love of the first person in YA dystopia and romance. And of course, I have to give him props for the attempt to make this folklore concept “scientific.” That’s what contributes to a lot of the length. Stoker is consolidating a lot of lore in one place to bring the old horror to the contemporary world. Van Helsing is trying to explain this complicated supernatural phenomenon and convince the characters, and thereby the audience, to buy into what’s happening. It’s drawing a line between his work and the penny dreadfuls.
This is also why you have an American, a Texan no less, hanging around with his bowie knife. It’s why Mina talks about what the New Woman would think, and speculates that someday, she will be asking the men to marry her. Lucy is delighted by slang. The present day xenophobia is as ubiquitous in the novel as the body horror of an undead monster sucking your bodily fluids.
Regardless, this book experiences some serious middle-of-the-plot sag. There are moments when his characters literally repeat something they just said. Van Helsing has looong speeches about practically everything. He gives Dr. Seward the randomest speech about “King Laughter,” aka grief makes you react in irrational ways, that is SO LONG. There was no reason for that to be there. Sometimes, some things, you have to summarize.
I look at literature with a critical modern eye as a writer, but also as someone who has taught literature. I love Austen more than my students can appreciate, but I can also say that sometimes even the canon authors need to kill their damn darlings. And if that means tightening up the middle of Dracula to get back to the action and not lose the tensions rising around Mina’s vulnerability, so be it.
Any canonized authors, or just wildly popular authors, who you wish you could give writing advice?
