Dracula

Exciting in the beginning and in the end, where the mystery and adventure elements of the story were the strongest. The rest of the book was dragged down by a quite slow pace and Victorian virtues which are at best outdated.

The slow pace particularly annoyed me, when the climax is so abrupt and immediately ends the book. The book is already long, so it wouldn’t have hurt to draw out the last parts.

The Victorian moralization is something which underlies the entire story, but is also in your face. I won’t go into too much detail, but an essence of horror is dealing with what is taboo. In the case of Victorian morals and Dracula, men and women’s sexuality is core to this.

A book can definitely be out dated in its gender roles and still be enjoyable, but in the case of Dracula, it is almost self congratulatory in how Mina stays in bed for the latter half of the book or how she is good a deduction and therefore thinks like a man. It just hasn’t aged well.