Great book, terrible landlord

Right. The opening section in the castle is as good as anything anyone has ever written, and then Jonathan gets out and the novel turns into a lot of extremely worried people writing letters to each other about how worried they are.

Here's my thing. He buys a wreck of a property in Whitby, sight unseen, ships his own soil over, and immediately starts making life unbearable for the neighbours. He is, functionally, my landlord. Same energy. Same refusal to answer anything in writing. The damp in my hallway has been going quietly green since March and I have decided the two situations are the same situation. Sorry, that isn't going anywhere, I just wanted to say it out loud to somebody.

The good: Lucy's chapters are genuinely upsetting, and the ship's log, where the crew of the Demeter disappear one at a time and the captain keeps writing it all down until there's nobody left to write about, is the best thing in the book and it's about six pages long.

The bad: Van Helsing talks like he's been put through a translation twice. Mina is far and away the most competent person in the story and they keep sending her upstairs to rest — why would you DO that, lads, she's the one with the typewriter and the filing. And the final act is essentially a train timetable with wolves.

Seven, for the castle, the ship, and Renfield, who is my favourite man in Victorian fiction. Bertha would have had every one of those flies off him.