I remember reading somewhere- I think it was in an annotated addition of Dracula, or maybe it was a journal article- that said that Bram Stoker wrote a large number of novels but everything he wrote other than Dracula was awful. Per Wikipedia he wrote 14 books, supposedly he was only able to write one good one.
It seems that often even Dracula is viewed as a "good bad book". Not high quality literature, but great to read.
I realise I've used vague terms in that sentence, even setting aside the tricky question of what makes the things often described as great works "greater" than things that are looked down on, but might be much more popular.
I once read a great foreword to a novel lamenting the loss of "good bad books", citing Dracula as an example. It was by a famous author (as I remember), but I can't remember, and can't find, the foreword or the novel I'm thinking of.
> Per Wikipedia he wrote 14 books, supposedly he was only able to write one good one.
It’s interesting that Dracula falls right in the middle of his career. It strongly suggests it was a fluke. Doesn’t look like he ever had an inkling of how famous the story would be, the Wikipedia page says he was best known while living for being a personal assistant and business manager to some other bloke. That’s a bit sad.
For me it feels like Stokers dracula is only so popular because it's where all the tropes come from, not because it's particularly well written, or something like that.
It's one of those firsts that established a genre.
I know Stoker didn't invent vampires, but they came into western English speaking culture through his Dracula.
I am not a literary critic, but I very much enjoyed Dracula. When I read it, I did not know there were claims he wasn't a good writer, so I had no bias, I simply liked it quite a bit.
I think that's classic chicken and egg. I've read it a few times over the years. It's a good story and fairly well written. And it obviously inspired movies and countless other works early on (as early as the 1920s). I don't think it has really been surpassed by other books or authors. Though there certainly have been some good ones. It both defines and leads the genre. Despite generations of literary critics trying to deconstruct and dismiss it, nobody has really done a better vampire story.
Thematically it is of course a dogs breakfast of repressed sexuality, homosexuality, etc. All of which were taboo topics in the Victorian age. Which is precisely why the story works so well. And even today it still works. If you can get over the Victorian era biases, it's a surprisingly fresh and modern story. Which is why modern takes on the story are still interesting.
And of course, these topics are still playing a role. Just look at the current election round in the US where things like abortion and gay rights are still being challenged. And it's not just the US where these topics are used by populist politicians to gain votes.
I don't know, Stroker does some interesting stuff in Dracula, essentially it's this Victorian hysterical story about extramarital or premarital sex "ruining" women (in this cases, essentially turning them into undead monsters as an extended metaphor for a woman's reputation being ruined in victorian society) as the cuckolded Victorian gentleman look in horror until they figure out the source of the trouble-- a no good foreigner.
There's also a sub-theme of the too secular modern men who don't believe in superstition (Jonathan Harker doesn't believe in vampires in the beginning) needing to get in better touch with Christianity to defeat Dracula- and features a rejection of secular psychiatry to defeat what turns out to not be "mental illness" way before The Exorcist did it.
It took me nearly 50 years before I learned how thoroughly gay Dracula really was. It was, of course, replete with coded references, and couldn't overtly depict homosexuality, so it was with Oscar Wilde, such as The Importance of Being Earnest.
Sadly I had really bought into the vampire chic trend when Coppola's Dracula came out in the early 90s. I had my dentist create some fangs for me to wear. More than one woman formally requested me to bite them on the neck. I dressed for goth clubs, more or less like an Anne Rice vampire (another thoroughly gay mythos).
It wasn't until Stephenie Meyer claimed vampires for the Latter-Day Saints movement that those Twilight sparkling dudes could be considered thoroughly hetero.
