Jonathan Harker is kind of a geek.  He’s obsessed with technology (typewriters, phonographs, stenography).  Early in the novel he’s philosophizing that: “Despair has its own calms.” He’s actually sort of a wuss until…well, I’ll let you read it & find out. 

I won’t go into the particulars here, but this novel has a lot of melodramatic dialogue, I mean a LOT.  Like, y’know, a Dan Brown novel or something.  But somehow in Dracula, it works: it’s a page-turner in part because of the villain.

The first thing to note about developing a really creepy miscreant is that he needs to have a cool, scary name.  Bram (he and I are on a first name basis) reputedly just sort of stumbled upon this name “Dracula” without knowing it to be attached to Vlad the Impaler, whom we are all pretty well aware of today.  He thought, “That’s a cool, scary name for a monster.  It’s exotic.  It means dragon.  Kind of awesome.”  (disclaimer: not a direct quote from Mr. Stoker).

The second thing to remember is that you need to establish 1) what others say about the antagonist 2) what he says of himself and 3) what the protagonist observes about him.  This is the formula in Dracula, in any case.  There are rumors from the lips of townsfolk while Harker travels to the castle. As soon as we meet Count Chocula, I mean Dracula, we are impressed with his haughtiness in the way he ignores what he doesn’t want to address and in the fact that his words and his physical reactions do not always accord.  Harker quickly trusts and respects him despite these clues.  And then the evidence begins to mount that the Count is indeed a villain, and not just a learned, attractive rich dude.  After several scenes that make the reader feel uneasy about the trust assigned to him, Stoker narrates an event that makes it impossible not to realize that the bad guy is planning to eat the naive guy, and then the bad guy abruptly disappears from the scene for like…the next 200 pages.  

The Count is onstage physically only in the beginning and then again briefly toward the end, pre-climax. His influence is apparent, and we see effects of the things he does offstage, but he doesn’t get much dialogue from there on in.  Then toward the middle, he gets to deliver his last real scene, a speech that freaks us the f%!k out and also gives away some crucial secret to the brain of the expedition.  It’s also kind of important if you have a super-crazy (or super-natural) villain that one of the characters be the brain to explain stuff to the reader. Somebody has to be studied up on more than a few aspects of the antagonist’s pathology and/or satanic abilities. You might even consider multiple viewpoint characters like Stoker did, so the reader gets many facets of the story, but all are limited.  I might even go so far as to say that if you’re going for suspense, never use the “omniscient” point of view, since the suspense lies in not knowing enough to totally understand what is going on.  

I have to admit, it was hard not to picture a painted Bela Lugosi when I read the Count’s scenes, but I tried to think of Vlad himself or, like…Adrien Brody in a tux & cape or something to sort of cleanse my vampire palate.  The only physical characteristics B.S. drills into us are that Dracula is tall and thin and sort of charming, so you can pick whomever you want.  Just not Bela. And if you can manage to suspend the Dracula-as-theme-park idea for a sustained period of time, to be honest, the story is still scary, partly because one of the victims is ever-present & you don’t know what her outcome will be until out it comes in the last few pages.  

That’s the last thing to remember about villains.  It matters who their victims are.  So I guess that’s the moral of the story: an effective villain requires a sympathetic victim.