Rhi Axtell – Writer

I had just inherited one of those old Kindles from my dad (you know the big, early ones with the keyboard on the bottom) and was excited. I remember scrolling through Amazon, looking at all the free books I could read. For free!

The idea of libraries had not yet sunk in for me at that age.

We were about to set off on a family holiday, and I was determined to read a classic novel. I had a strange idea at that age that reading classic novels, even if you didn’t particularly enjoy them, made you smarter. Since then, I have learnt that classic does not always equal good.

Anyway, I chose my title to read on the holiday. The first book I read in its entirety on my old, chunky Kindle: Dracula.

Today’s spooky thing!

All I really remember from that particular family holiday is sitting on a bed in a room with wooden walls (perhaps we were in a cabin of some sort?) and reading Dracula. I was completely absorbed by it. It was the first epistolary book I had ever really encountered (in adult fiction, at least). The idea that you could tell a story through letters, newspaper clippings, and diary entries was mind-blowing to me. I really found that the ‘story adjacent‘ way of being fed narrative plot points* almost made the whole tale more creepy and unnerving. It also casts a cloud of doubt across the whole thing – who can you trust? Are they all reliable narrators? What really happened?

*by that I mean, being told about things which happened after the fact, or from a far off perspective.

A perfect example of this in Dracula is, of course, the voyage of the Demeter. A short segment in the book where we find Dracula has been transported to Whitby on the ship the Demeter, and has feasted on each of the members of the ship one by one (which we learn by reading the ship’s log). The ship itself, we learn through a newspaper article, runs ashore with the final crew member, dead, and tied to the ship’s wheel.

These gaps in the narrative leave so much to the imagination – which is probably why this small part of the tale has been adapted multiple times, more recently into a full length film.

Dracula is a classic because it inspires so much beyond it. You have the main story and a hundred other little stories with their own questions as well. I think that’s why we have so many vampire spin-offs and tales today. I’m even trying to write one, although it may never see the light of day*.

*Absolutely a vampire joke.

Anyway, if you haven’t read, go do it now! You won’t regret it.

See you tomorrow.