Creatures of the night! What music you make!
A couple years after the internet rediscovered Dracula via Dracula Daily, I finally reread it. (This is the best photo I could find of the haunting cover to my 1990s, $2.95 Signet Classics paperback.) And you know what? I was surprised at how good it is! Dracula goes hard—the first time we meet the Brides of Dracula, both the sexuality and the horror are much, much stronger than I expected. I gasped! More than once! As with a lot of horror tales, that early scene is the most intense one, because once the stakes (heh) are raised that high, you can rely on suspense and dread rather than shock. But the shock is pretty sharp.
And the characters touched me a lot more than I expected (or remembered). Jonathan Harker is a precursor to all those postwar PTSD heroes, your Lord Wimseys and whatnot. His diary is so matter-of-fact about his own actions that, for me, his bravery only became vivid when other people were astonished at what he’d been through—and at that point, he’s nervy and flashbacky, constantly on the verge of collapse or hysteria. Love it, like all modern girls I love a man who’s a damsel in distress. But no, he’s a real surprise; Lucy, too, feels so real and vivid in her ardent youth, that her transformation into a ghoul is genuinely heartbreaking. Like, you know that all these things will happen, and yet Stoker makes you feel them as if you are seeing them for the first time. Even Renfield’s final scene is just wrenching: “[H]e went on as if he owned the whole place, and I was no one”; “I don’t care for the pale people.”
Nor did I remember the humor. Van Helsing is just such an odd duck! His whole creepy little speech about laughter is great, at once true and unsettling, off-kilter. His awkward English is played for comedy, but he also gets to make fun of the seamen for their cussing, their language that is “much of blood and bloom.” The newspaper reporter who gets the scoop about the wolf, the recurring theme of “thirsty work” and euphemized bribery—there’s a vivacity in Stoker’s prose, an entertainer’s flexibility of emotional tone.
The structure, with the diaries and documents, feels a bit haphazard, but at the same time I don’t think I would want it presented completely chronologically as Dracula Daily does. The looping back sometimes slackens the suspense, but sometimes makes you only too aware of what’s happening off-page. There’s a definite longueur once all the anti-Drac forces are assembled. The overturning of expectations has happened—we now accept that Jonathan is at once brave and fragile, and Mina is strong and intelligent, and we don’t need forty pages of paeans to their virtue. Quincey and Arthur remain kind of one-note, although Quincey’s one note being “exotic, manly Texan” is sort of endearing.
I have this whole shtik about how authority in horror fiction always goes to the marginalized: the old, the unwell, the traditional, the teenager—if you’re in a horror movie, you need to listen to the people whom Modernity (TM) would dismiss as irrational. Dracula is fun in that, like Christianity (like the Catholic Reformation!), it locates authority in both premodern and modern sources: peasant superstition and medical science, religious faith and tabloid journalism. You maybe already know that new technologies are a big part of the book, the typewriter and the Winchester repeating rifle, but it’s hard to overstate Stoker’s sweet enthusiasm for these gadgets. Blood transfusion metaphors and disquisitions on the natural properties of the parrot! It’s just really enjoyable to see genre expectations so thoroughly overturned at the founding of the genre itself.
And… Mina sees herself in Dracula the way Dan Torrance sees himself in the vampire in Doctor Sleep—there’s a compassion born of feeling herself tainted, made impure against her will, and while Dracula itself plays that out with a cruel metaphor of rape, it does work pretty well as a metaphor for the ways addiction and violence can have their roots in the unchosen intertwining of DNA and family experience. That poignancy of the impure is part of the emotional undercurrent of my friend Gabriel Blanchard’s vampire novel, Death’s Dream Kingdom. It isn’t actually possible to be cut off from God without your consent; Christians are to prefer shame to honor when we get to pick. But it’s also just a fact of the human condition that nobody believes those two things.
I Will Not Let You Go Until You Bless Me
I reported for the Pillar on the experiences of queer Catholics receiving blessings pre- and post-Fiducia supplicans. Some wisdom in this piece from a local priest, and also, I hope, a window into the varied and complex experiences of people in the pews, who are sincerely seeking to live in obedience to the Church, our Mother and Teacher, in situations where Her good counsel is not always obvious.
I also love that people are forming a network of privately-vowed lay celibates in the comments to that piece! The only blessed comments thread in the history of the internet.
Speaking of the Pillar, here’s a sobering piece on the coming crisis for immigrant priests and vowed religious in the US due to the visa backlog: “I’ve spoken with bishops who say that 30, 40, or even 50 of their priests and nuns will have to leave.”
And speaking of vocations, and the varied paths of love, the Sojourners community in San Francisco has an apprenticeship open! Sojourners is a Christian intentional community in a loose network of other communities (one of my childhood best friends is in a different community in their network) and it has been around since the ‘80s. I know a lot of people nowadays have longings for community but don’t have a strong sense of how to do it or where to begin. Sojourners has wisdom, tried by experience. I would highly recommend checking it out even if you ultimately decide this way of life is not for you. Tim Otto, author of the insightful slim book Oriented to Faith: Transforming the Conflict Over Gay Relationships, is a member of the SF community; I quoted him and another Sojourners member in my 2017 America magazine essay on community and kinship outside of religious life and marriage.
[note: edited to fix the founding date of Sojourners!]
Also the skull of St Jean de Brebeauf is on tour around the USA so you should go and venerate this extremely metal relic if it comes to your area.
Now Playing
Toto Coelo, “Dracula Tango.” Not linking to their actual music video because it includes blasphemy against the Blessed Sacrament. No thanks!
Darling ickle vampire bat photographed by Uwe Schmidt, found via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.
The article in The Pillar hit home for me. I’m in a three-church parish in Chicago that’s cared for by Conventual Franciscans. One of the pastors is Venezuelan, and another is Kenyan (he’s the second Kenyan that’s served in this parish—the first one is now up in Green Bay). The head pastor is from Florida, but he was transferred to us from Sydney. The Franciscans are probably better able to manage this sort of thing than secular parishes, but it can’t be easy for them either.