The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

It's appropriate that as I'm posting this review, the dog is chewing on my arm.

*****

The question that drives Elizabeth Kostova’s hit vampire novel, The Historian, is this: What if Dracula were still alive today?

The main character is a precocious teenage girl whose academe father is a historian. Years ago, when he was a lowly graduate student, his mentor had mysteriously disappeared while researching vampires. Searching for his missing professor, the historian found an assload of adventure and intrigue. Now his daughter is following him as he follows his favorite professor into the bowels of Eastern Europe. There’s also a beautiful Romanian girl. Isn’t there always?

The novel is written in at least three different points in history, and is given through a staggering variety of letters, memoirs, notes, and documents. What a mess, seriously - how did she keep them all straight? The farther it got into the past, the more interesting the letters became. This was one novel where I didn't feel impatient to get back to the main character in present day. I wanted to hear more about the monks and whatnot.

But what about Dracula? Is he still alive? Well, to be honest, the vampire stuff was cool – bloody necks and crypts and whatnot – but the “horror” plot really took a back seat to the geography and history lesson. The book is set all over the place – Istanbul, Budapest, and all kinds of remote locations in Romania and Bulgaria. The vampire history was fascinating, along with the details of Vlad the Impaler’s fight with the Ottoman Empire, the church’s medieval history, and glimpses of rural life in the Carpathian mountains.

You’d think the history stuff would have been the background you just suffer through to get to the next creepy blood-sucking, but it was actually the other way around. Made me want to go to Istanbul. I don’t know where Kostova crossed over from research into invention, and I don’t really care. For six hundred pages, I was hooked.

Highly recommended, if not for the scare factor, then for the landscape.