I know, it's a book from the 1800s. I picked it up because I liked the feel of Penguin Classics papebacks and its condition (lived in someone's bag for a bit) just spoke to my heart.
There are good part to it, like genuinely creepy imagery, a concept of a down on his luck man stumbling upon an entity with a agenda, this entity proposing an alliance to the person it persives as an enemy of its enemy. Some parts read better than others, different POVs read as different people, but that's about it.
The rest is just…''Arabs are scary''. It's racist, the rest is racism to the point of repeating that a human sacrifice cult has a preference on White Christian English Women. Isis was thrown in there. A character that doesn't get a POV, but is the target of that cult, seemingly got drugged and abused, and if there ever was an adaptation, I'd like to see that explored. Nothing warrants a whole page about how ugly the man entity posed as is. I was so dissapointed and I know it's kind of silly.
I guess it's kind picking out fresher berries out of a 60% rotten basket. If you are choosing between this and Brahm Stoker's ''Treasure of Seven Stars'', read Stoker. It's still a little bit weak by the end, but holds up much better in my opinion.
by skylerren
1 Comment
I’d say that the opening segment (I recall The Beetle being in three distinct sections, each from a different viewpoint) is so good that the growing weakness of the succeeding two is not a problem. I would say that it is vastly better than Jewel of the Seven Stars but clearly inferior to Dracula… Inferior, but not so much so that the comparison is ridiculous.