A Virgin Disses DRACULA? Not on MY Watch!

I’ll cut her a little bit of slack, since she’s a friend of mine. But still, this is DRACULA we’re talking about. Of course the character is not bound by and contained exclusively in the novel in which he made his debut, so I could rationalize that Ms. Erin Chapman is not dissing Dracula so much as she is Bram Stoker, and not Stoker so much as she is dissing his most famous work. Ms. Chapman, of VAMPED, you see, had never read the novel before, and she is obviously not an English Lit major, since she admits: “I don’t exactly make it a habit of reading books this old so I have no point of comparison.” Ah, Erin, had you ever been forced to read GREAT EXPECTATIONS or JUDE THE OBSCURE methinks you would appreciate just how action-packed is DRACULA.

Erin didn’t savage the book too badly, honestly, just said that it wasn’t her “type” of story, which is fine. To each his, or her, own. She has every right to be wrong if she so chooses. She does admit, thankfully, else I would have to lambaste her soundly here, that the vampire genre “owes a great deal to Stoker as he set the stage for authors and filmmakers to come.” I’ll go one step farther, though: The vampire genre would not even exist today if it wasn’t for Stoker’s novel. Like it, love it, or loathe it, DRACULA is the foundation upon which it all rests. Upon that rock Stoker built his modern Myth. And the scorn of critics shall never prevail against it.