Vampire Book Review: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova

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If you love history and are fascinated by Dracula stories – both the gothic tales and the real history of Vlad III The Impaler -- you should enjoy this novel.
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More precisely, if you appreciate the sound methodology and scholarship of true historians, if you love libraries and old books, if you can get hooked on well-told arcane histories of exotic places and times such as the late medieval Balkans as the Ottoman Turks are over-running Southeastern Europe, if gothic tales of vampirism tempt you, and if you like good fiction writing mixed with it all, then The Historian (2005) by Elizabeth Kostova should be well worth reading.
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I had heard good things about this book, but I was not prepared to like it so much. I had read In Search of Dracula and follow-up histories about the real Vlad Dracula, aka Vlad III Tepes (1431-1476 CE), when they were first published several decades ago, and of course I was a major fan of Bram Stoker’s novel, of Bela Lugosi’s movie classic and of a few other of the better-made vampire films.
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In this novel, the historical detail fascinated me, and the historian-as-detective plot delighted me. The action sweeps across many decades in the 20th century – as well as the 15th century and other times – and much of it takes place in the 1950s in an Eastern Europe that is still behind the communist Iron Curtain and in the grip of sinister masters.
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I could not put the book down until I had finished. You might want to keep an Atlas or world map handy while you read, as the scenes often include travels to places most of us usually do not visit or know much about.
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-Zenwind.
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