It was high time I read this, one of the original works on vampires--those legendary monsters that have persisted for centuries and inspired a fascinatingly wide range of incarnations--from Anne Rice's Interview With A Vampire to Joss Whedon's Buffy to Marvel's Blade and far into the sparkly beyond... 
 I didn't realize going in that the entire book would be made up of numerous journal and diary entries, news articles, and personal correspondence. This flows together surprisingly well--offering readers several different POVs without absolutely ensuring that every perspective's originator will actually survive to the end of the tale. (For all we know, this was a compilation discovered long after the fantastical events depicted.) 
 "Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain." 
 The first 100 pages are particularly enthralling. It begins with a man named Jonathan Harker being essentially lured to Transylvania and the estate of one Count Dracula (acting under a business contract involving the count's prospective move to England.) Stoker paints a dark and lurid atmosphere, from the tense and seemingly superstitious demeanor of the locals to the increasingly strange occurrences that Harker witnesses and records as his visit becomes more of an imprisonment. The essence of the original horror intent comes through strongest in these first chapters. 
 We transition then to England and the interactions/correspondences between Johnathan Harker's fiance, Mina, and her childlike friend, Lucy. Here is where this reader ran into the most attention-deficit difficulty. Mina is a tolerably intelligent and respectable woman (considering the societal constraints of the time period), but Lucy is sweet and vapid enough to induce cavities with a side of nausea. 
 Side Note: Someone desperately needed to put a bell around Lucy's neck. Preferably, a bell shaped like a crucifix. >.> 
 The pace finally picks back up about the time the sage Dr. Van Helsing shows up on the scene. A vampire-hunting collective forms organically then under his leading, composed of Johnathan and Mina Harker, an asylum administrator named John "Jack" Seward, Lord Godalming (who is surprisingly easy to confuse with John Seward) and an American cowboy-ish figure named Quincy Morris. It does, however, take Van Helsing a significant amount of time (and evidence) to convince Seward and Godalming of their supernatural opposition and set them on an offensive course against the invading Count Dracula. 
 "You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot?" 
 This reader was pleasantly surprised by the degree of spiritual depth and conviction present in several prominent characters--not the least of which was Van Helsing. This added a lot of dimension to Stoker's characterization. There was even the stressing of pity and withholding malice as he encouraged the Count's destruction--implying it a sort of mercy for whomever Dracula once was before his body was claimed for evil purposes. 
 In a nutshell? 
 This book has the peculiar ability to swing back and forth from primordial horror/suspense to a dragging , wordy tedium. There is significant plot lag through the middle (particularly when judged by today's literary expectations), but the elegant prose and promise of harrowing (not to mention satisfying) resolution should be enough to keep most readers pushing on.