Treat...and a Trick!





What better way to get in the Halloween mood than by reading Dracula by Bram Stoker? [I read it for free at www.Literature.org!]  I wondered if I would be really scared because since the age of 14 after reading Salem’s Lot by Stephen King and going to sleep for a month with a cross under my pillow, vampires tend to scare me.  But, I needn’t have worried - I really liked it, particularly the way the story was told by using different journal entries by different characters and compiling them to tell a story that was, at times, a little creepy.  It never got full-on scary, though.  I did fall just a little bit in love with the Dr. Van Helsing character in the book [I tend to gravitate towards the eccentric genius type].

The story moves along pretty briskly and the descriptions, dialogue and multiple points of view are expertly delivered.  I greatly enjoyed Mina’s journal entries, and felt that her side of the story was the soul of the book, while Dr. Jack Sewerd’s was the backbone.  [What else?  I mean, she’s a woman in love and he’s a psychiatrist].  Mina is clearly a smart, independent woman and it shows in her journal entries and her willingness to help the men hunt down the Count and kill him.  I was surprised at the depth of the two main female characters, Mina and Lucy, and their “modern-ness.”  I also found it ironic that the more the men played to the stereotype of men-as-protectors, the more harm came to the women.  Even more surprising [and endearing] was Dr. Van Helsing’s continuous praise of Mina as a strong, smart woman, who should be held as a standard of excellence among society.  The end of the book was rather abrupt, but satisfying.  Even though I didn’t think the book itself was scary, the more I thought about the characters and the story, the more frightened I felt.  I suppose the true test for a horror story is whether the reader’s imagination takes hold of the idea and takes it to the next level.  Count Dracula is a cultural icon and while vampires are all the rage now, there’s a certain simplicity to this book and Stoker’s Dracula character that makes it far more appealing and frightening than anything more recent.    

All through the book, I kept picturing Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing because he was the only character I really remembered from the 1992 movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  So, I felt a good bit of anticipation before settling back to watch the movie.  Now, some people [my son, my husband, my friends, my mother….okay – a lot of people] think I am too hard on movies adapted from books.  I admit I am a purist when it comes to adaptations, but I thought I had mellowed quite a bit [thanks Harry Potter], and was prepared to take some deviation as par for the course.  Well, if it had only been some deviation, I could have gotten over it, I think, but this was a travesty!  I say that, but then I recall the early nineties as being a wasteland when it came to most fashion, music and anything else requiring creative thought.  This movie is no exception.  I’m sure they thought they were being super artsy when Dracula’s shadow does strange things, but in the book, Count Dracula doesn’t even HAVE a shadow.  That’s just one example. 



One of the few scenes with Mina and Lucy fully clothed



Really, you could probably classify this movie as soft porn, what with the women kissing, bared breasts and moaning for no apparent reason, etc.  Ridiculous!  Needless to say, it didn’t follow the book closely at all.  It should have been called “A Vampire’s Kiss:  Mina And Lucy’s Erotic Adventure With An Ancient Vampire Turned Young”.  What’s worse is that I absolutely loathed Anthony Hopkins’s portrayal of Van Helsing!  He was pretentious, overbearing, snobbish and a complete ass – nothing like the book! 



           My advice is skip the movie unless you’re a huge fan of seeing Winona Ryder in revealing dresses and watching her breasts heave, or you want to see a young Keanu Reeves playing something besides a time-traveling buffoon [well, he’s still a buffoon, but he doesn’t get to meet Abe Lincoln in this flick].  If you want a good read that isn’t gory or in-your-face scary, then Dracula is for you.  If you like Dracula, here’s another fantastic read on vampires and Count Dracula - The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. 


Great Book - little scary, though



Hostage to the Devil

Here’s how my life works:  I read an article or book and I think to myself - “Is this true?”  So, of course, like any other well educated American, I hit the Internet to see what’s out there on that particular subject.  As I research, I become intrigued by a related word, phrase, picture or name and I follow that link further into the Internet cosmos until I find something that finally gets my full attention [Why, yes, I do have a touch of ADHD] 

This particular fall down the rabbit hole led me to Hostage to the Devil, a free e-book by Malachi Martin.  There are people out there who feel very strongly that the devil exists and influences our lives on a daily basis.  “Ah, yes,” you may be thinking, “the ignorant, the fundamentalist, the religious fanatic!”  Or, you could be thinking more along the abstract “Evil exists, yes, but only as construct of humanity – a classification of aberrant social behavior“ [Ok, so maybe only the anthropologists out there are thinking that.]

~~Of the five case studies presented in this book, I could only make myself read through the second.~~


Whatever it is you are thinking, it can’t compare to “I no longer want to read this book, “which was my exact thought around page 117, followed by “I want to delete this book from my computer’s hard drive and then have my computer blessed by a religious person.”  This is not an exaggeration.  I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as truly creepy as this [and I’m a Stephen King fan!].  

Two things stood out:  First, there are grammatical and punctuation errors throughout the book that I know, on a rational level, were most likely caused by the OCR program that scanned this book in, but…there is a part of me that thinks that the errors are there on purpose.  For what purpose, I don’t know – or maybe won’t permit myself to guess at, but I have a pretty vivid imagination, and what I come up with is something like a secret demonic code that is unwittingly translated as you read and hard-wires  your brain into receiving Satan and all his minions into your subconscious.  [Sounds fun, huh?] 

The second thing that I could not seem to reconcile was the startling intelligence behind the writing in this book.  You can immediately tell that an educated person – an intellectual, in fact – wrote this book.  Having my liberal arts education turned on its ear was hardly comforting.  This intelligence coupled with the glaring mistakes in grammar and punctuation is creepy in and of itself, and lent the book an overall dark and disturbing energy. 

I never did finish the book.  [And I probably will delete it from my hard drive.]