King Laugh, the train fiend, and other old friends

I have spent the last six months once again reading Dracula via email! I didn’t realize I didn’t have to sign up again to do another go-round of Dracula Daily; next year I think I will unsubscribe and follow along in my weird old annotated copy. (I am also being threatened with another round of The Beetle Weekly and that I think I simply could not survive.)

Anyway, Dracula continues to be a great story, about which most pop culture tropes and certainly nearly all film adaptations are a tragedy and a waste. Lucy and Jonathan especially are consistently done dirty. All the humor is stripped, a thing I think is more and more a problem every time I read the book and run across the corn speech, or Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat. Reading this book in small chunks with a bunch of insane Tumblrites is both a lot of fun and really ends up highlighting how a lot of mainstream and even academic Dracula discourse is at least as bonkers and wrong-headed as your average Tumblr-dwelling ball of mental illnesses.

Anyway it’s just. So good. The character work is so good. The horror is so good. It’s got a bunch of fucked-up Victorian English shit but unlike a lot of fucked-up Victorian English lit it’s got so much heart. This one is a classic for a reason.

Star-crossed Vernons

This summer I picked up a copy of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s not particularly well-known novel The Rose and the Key, and I figured it would make good spooky season reading once I’d finished rereading Carmilla. And apart from the bit where partway into the month I developed a severe case of Not Being Able To Focus On Anything, For Reasons, it was! The Rose and the Key is nowhere near being a masterpiece like Carmilla, but it’s still got some enjoyable 19th-century gothic nonsense going on. You’ve got your high-spirited but isolated young woman protagonist, some sinister religious zealots–pious in public, vicious in private–a whole host of gently ridiculous village character types, some star-crossed loves and family feuds, and, once the actual action gets rolling, that most sinister of Victorian institutions, the madhouse. (OK, most Victorian institutions are sinister, but the madhouse is a big one in gothics.)

The pacing is very nineteenth-century–slow and meandering in a way that modern writing isn’t allowed to be anymore, at least up until about halfway through, then the pace picks up considerably. The ending felt a bit rushed to tie everything up in a neat little bow. I personally didn’t mind the slow beginning, as I like meandering Victorian setups; I didn’t love the rushed ending although at that point I’d been reading the book for so long I was grateful to get to the end.

While there is some period-typical British bullshit I think that overall the themes explored here retain a certain amount of relevance–pious hypocrites using their public respect, wealth, and incomprehensible paperwork to hurt those who they ought to care for; the vicious neglect and cruelty that can be hidden within materially well-off families; the pathologization of teenage girls’ behavior and emotions; medical and especially psychiatric abuse; the way people rationalize their own terrible behavior. It’d be nice if that stuff was as dated as the way the characters talk and the way they construct their social calendars, but alas.

Overall this is the sort of mediocre novel I prefer when I’m reading mediocre novels these days, because I don’t want to read brightly colored “beach read” type things due to being a dour weirdo, but I will fully admit it’s a fairly mediocre novel. It’s not quite as wackily bad as Varney the Vampyre or The Beetle, and it’s not as genuinely good horror as Carmilla or Dracula or any of the things that have become proper literary classics, but it has its moments and I had a perfectly decent time reading it.