this took me a month to read and that for sure says something. this book is far too long and doesn’t feel like a horror novel until the end — even then, it’s all tied up so neatly. the first 85%-ish of the novel is atmospheric, high-brow, hist/lit fic with a repetitive, relatively predictable, and frankly pretty uninteresting plot. epistolary horror can for sure be good (Dracula, for one) but this was simply not that, as hard as it tries. the letters & stories were tied together in ways that it was sometimes hard to track: for example sometimes you’d be reading a conversation within a letter that’s copied within a letter that’s within the main narrative, and you’d have like five quotation marks beginning every paragraph. when it comes to the horror itself this was also pretty disappointing. it’s all over SO fast, which sucks especially compared to the 600 page exposition. Dracula was super weakly constructed and not a very compelling villain. esp in contrast to all the other vamp fiction I’ve read, this Dracula is easily the weakest and least horrifying.

overall wouldn’t really recommend this at all, unless you just desperately want a long chunk of a book to read that lacks compelling characters, has an incredibly drawn-out exposition, and lacks any capturing horror elements.