Seeing the World Through Books

Author Elizabeth Kostova’s unusual debut novel combines her ten years of scholarly research on Vlad Tepes, the Impaler of Wallachia, sometimes known as Drakulya, with the stories that have become part of local folklore in Bulgaria and Rumania, and the legends created and perpetuated by Bram Stoker (in his novel Dracula). A sadistic prince from the mid-fifteenth century who killed up to 15,000 of his own people, often impaling them on stakes and leaving them to die horrible deaths, Vlad terrified his enemies from the Ottoman Empire, though it was Stoker who created the belief that he was a vampire. Three people from the twentieth century, all of whom have studied Drakulya and his history, tell interlocking stories here through letters, archived research documents, scholarly lectures, and their own experiences. All believe that Drakulya still walks the earth, selecting his acolytes and spreading his evil through bites on the neck, which leave them “undead.

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This 1897 novel begins with the arrival of Jonathan Harker, a lawyer representing a London real estate agency, at the Transylvanian castle of Count Dracula to clinch the deal by which the count will move to a British estate. Details about Harker’s arrival by coach, his greeting at the castle, which has no doors except the front door, his reception by the count (who has hair on the palms of his hands), and his instructions regarding where he may go or not go within the castle set the tone and establish the mysterious background of the count and a sense of dread regarding the outcome for Harker. By the time Harker recovers from a long and mysterious illness and returns home, the count, already in London, has turned Lucy, a lovely ingenue, into a vampire. The novel is far more compelling than I expected, creating suspense at the same time that it develops the character of the count with his supernatural powers. Fun.

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