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Our Booking-Office: Dracula
26 June 1897 · Punch
Estate summary
Punch finds Dracula ingenious but complains that its diaries and journals become wearisome. The reviewer mocks the characters’ questioning and objects to the religious machinery used against the vampire.
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“I wants to make your flesh creep,” might Mr. Bram Stoker well say as a preface to his latest book, named Dracula, which he has given in charge of the Constables (& Co.) to publish. The story is told in diaries and journals, a rather tantalising and somewhat wearisome form of narration, whereof Wilkie Collins was a past-master. In almost all ghostly, as in most detective stories, one character must never be absent from the dramatis personæ, and that is The Inquiring, Sceptical, Credulous Noodle. The Inquiring Noodle of Fiction must be what in comedy “Charles his friend” is to the principal comedian, “only more so,” as representing the devoted, admiring slave of the philosophic astute hero, ever ready to question, ever ready to dispute, ever ready to make a mistake at the critical moment, or to go to sleep just when success depends on his remaining awake. “Friend John” is Mr. Bram Stoker’s Noodle-in-Chief. There are also some secondary Noodles; Noodles of no importance. This weird tale is about Vampires, not a single, quiet, creeping Vampire, but a whole brood of them, governed by a Vampire Monarch, who is apparently a sort of first cousin to Mephistopheles. Rats, bats, wolves and vermin obey him, but his power, like that of a certain well-advertised soap, “which will not wash clothes,” has its limits; and so at last he is trapped, and this particular brood of vampires is destroyed as utterly as would be a hornets’ nest when soused with hot pitch. It is a pity that Mr. Bram Stoker was not content to employ such supernatural anti-vampire receipts as his wildest imagination might have invented without rashly venturing on a domain where angels fear to tread. But for this, the Baron could have unreservedly recommended so ingenious a romance to all who enjoy the very weirdest of weird tales.
The Baron de B.-W.
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