Dracula – Night Owl Reviews

Manga Classics: Dracula is a manga retelling of Dracula by Bram Stoker. While it is a retelling due to changing the medium of the story it is using the original text of Dracula, though some has been left out to help condense the story, and is accurate to the novel.

I would recommend this as a way of getting in to Dracula if you have tried the novel and didn’t enjoy the experience. Much like other ways of reading Dracula, such as Dracula Daily, you get to understand the horror of Dracula and how different adaptations have changed the story over time.

For instance, in the original novel Mina is not Dracula’s reincarnated wife and Dracula while probably inspired by Vlad the Impaler he is not that historical figure. Unlike movies and other adaptations Dracula is a horror story and is not a love story at least not for Dracula.

In this manga adaptation the visuals are amazing and they take the time to give each character a slightly different writing style to help tell the story. I love Dracula and I love different adaptations so I figured I would enjoy this manga.

Lucy Undying by Kiersten White follows Lucy from Dracula where she doesn’t dye like she does in Dracula. We are told the story through Lucy’s diary, and interview she did with someone she saved, and the current events told by another character Iris’s point of view. Iris’s mother recently dies and she is trying to run away from an evil MLM her family control and comes to London to try to sell off some property/items that she has inherited for some quick cash and ends up meeting Lucy.

While I end up enjoying the story if was not what I was expecting based on the cover, title, and what little I had heard about the book. I thought we were going to get more of a Dracula retelling but from Lucy’s point of view which we do get small amounts of but that is not what most of the book is about.

Personally, I don’t feel like Kristen White likes the story of Dracula and if you love Dracula (the original novel) you might not like this. Mina is portrayed as a conniving bitch and Lucy’s suitors are trying to steel her family’s money. Once we find out how the MLM Iris’s family runs works, it’s a self-help one that allows followers to live forever by becoming vampires, I was more interested in where that story would go. I would have preferred a vampire novel focusing on the MLM concept without any connection to Dracula. However, I did like how Dracula and all the other Vampires Lucy has met show up in the end and I did enjoy how Dracula was portrayed, as to me it is fairly book accurate.