Roundup

The members of our ever-expanding blogroll have crafted a number of thought-provoking posts about the first few chapters of the novel.

The Valve declares Dracula to be “very good … and also very bad“.

Infinitedetox discusses the role of the sublime in the novel. Earlier, he examined Dracula through the lens of genre fiction: “There’s a certain set of rules that the book must deal with, and part of the fun for us, as readers, is to see which rules get followed and which get broken and which get bent all to hell in ways that we maybe didn’t expect.”

Observations from the fine folks at Infinite Zombies: the citizenry in Dracula love a spectacle, the count has the “ability to project mojo/vibe/Dracularity well beyond himself“, and Harker comes across as a little “dim“.

At That Sounds Cool, Aaron muses about the way the story is being told: the deliberate pacing, the unreliable narrator, and the tendency of the book to “jump through time, narrators, and moods.

William of Human Complex describes Dracula as a trickster:

I do mean that in the Jungian sense. At first glance (and relying on collective cultural baggage and preconceptions), Count Dracula would ostensibly seem to fit the archetype of the Shadow. Lurking, hiding. A sinister foreigner. Gypsy. Thief and burglar of blood. Inchoate. There but not there. The stuff of nightmares. But, as we see in the first chapter, he doesn’t actually hide in the shadows, he has no need to. He uses deceit to achieve his goals from the very first time we meet him. He’s always a step ahead. He is cunning, funny, and foolish but not the fool. He is an animal master. A gypsy shaman.

Others who wrote about Dracula this week:

• Victoria of Views from the Page and the Oven.
• Lacey of The Captain Lied.
• Robert of Metro Marginalia.
• The gang over at of Dragons Devouring Delicious Books!.
• Talekyn of Rambling On ….

Also, Jonathan McNicol–the man providing the lovely PDF chapters (which you can find in our sidebar), spoke about the project here.