New media.  Sexual tension.  Outsiders versus the Establishment. Technology.  Public hysteria.  And the blood-sucking undead.  With all these goodies, who wouldn't want to read Dracula?

The folks who brought you an online reading of David Foster Wallace's epic novel of addiction and tennis Infinite Jest have moved on to a group reading of Bram Stoker's Dracula beginning on October 1st with the appropriate ending date of October 31st, All-Hallow's Eve.

I'm joining them for a couple of reasons, none of which have anything to do with the Twilight books.

1) Vampires are the perfect horror beastie:  powerful, intelligent, alluring, magical, undead and utterly rational and sane in their pursuit of food.  Freddie's angry, Leatherface is insane and Jason just needs a hug.  It's their rage - ill-timed and improperly directed - that ends up doing them in every time.  Dracula?  Well he all but convinces his victims to lay open their own veins.  Imagine something so frightening yet so irresistable.  Bram Stoker did.

2) Stoker's novel played around with the conventions of the traditional novel to create something completely new.  Dracula's is not a traditional linear narrative.  Instead we get snippets of journals, transcriptions, doctors' notes, personal recollections and much more.  All novels rely on these elements one one form or fashion, but Dracula forewent a traditional omniscient narrator in favor of this patchwork of reporting on something that defied logic, tradition and the known science of the day.

3) Dracula's another way to deal with the Big Questions.  Whether theological or psychological, Dracula challenges many of the notions on which Western society was built upon. If there was, as the Count so clearly proves, undeath after life, does that prove or disprove the Western view of Heaven?  How can God's universe can include such evil as Dracula makes flesh?  What would one's mindset be facing down the possibility of living forever, knowing that everything you love will eventually die, leaving you behind?

I don't know as I'll reach any real, usable answers over the next month.  But I do know that being a part of larger online community as you'll find at infinitesummer/dracula will provide an interesting forum to explore them.

Welcome.... (bwah hah hah haaaaaaa).