Things that go bump in the Night....

and no Michael, I'm not talking about my bed :)
One thing I love to do is to spend time in Barnes & Noble looking through books and killing time. I wandered by some classics the other day ~ and went back to review some of the great titles I remember from childhood or from the reading list in high school (whether I read them or not is another story). To my amazement there it was ~ DRACULA, and it was $6.95. I can thank my Dad for the love of horror movies and books. He was always watching them when I was a child and I had a love/hate fascination with them.

I remember my parents had an old china cabinet in their bedroom. It was painted black and they had converted it to a storage chest. The top portion had reams of books. One of the books was Bram Stoker's Dracula. I can still remember the cover and the smell of the paperback pages. I was always drawn to it and felt the chill when handling the book and at a young age was aware of the mystery that surrounded the story. To be honest, I don't even know if I ever read it in my formative years, but we knew vampire movies in my house, that's for sure. I was always fascinated and yet scared shitless at the same time (that's a literary term for those who don't know).

Anyway, I decided to purchase the book and place it in my stack of "must reads". It didn't stay of the pile long. I decided to forgo the book I was reading and bite into Dracula (hee hee). The time had come to revisit the book and to experience the legend first hand.

On the first evening, I opened the book and all of a sudden I was acutely aware of being alone in the house. Now as I lay in bed with the night light on, the silence is deafening and every noise has a deeper meaning. It's amazing how the mind can play tricks on you and as I opened this book, I unleashed the fears and creepy feelings of a child afraid of things that go bump in the night.

It almost feels like a roller coaster. You are scared and yet you want the feeling to continue and you can't stop yourself from experiencing the exhilarating adventure. I was surprised how quickly the story jumped into the macabre and how our hero Jonathan Harker quickly realizes that there is more than meets the eye with his host. I'm only 75 pages in and yet I am drawn in further, looking for chances to steal away to read a bit more.

To me this is a classic. This spooky story has withstood the test of time and although the movies and romanticism have become part and parcel with the legend, the book is quite different than the that, and yet it is equally as engaging to me.

I write this entry tonight with the hopes this isn't my last blog. Things have been very strange and I'm not sure what my future holds. I only hope that if something should happen to me that this will be proof that something evil is out there and I feel like it's watching me and coveting my every move....oh wait a minute, I think that is probably someone in the chorus...nevermind :() (for those of you not familiar with the book, it's written in the style of journal entries by our protagonist :))