Dracula no myth in new 'Historian'

THE HISTORIAN, by Elizabeth Kostova; Little, Brown and Company; 642 pages, $25.95 (hardback).

If someone were to tell you that Dracula is undead and well today, would you believe him? What if he could prove it to you through historical documents, woodcuts, sightings throughout Europe, strange riddles from history professors, mysterious abductions and animalistic attacks?

This is what Elizabeth Kostova does with her best-selling debut novel "The Historian." And while this is a vampire book, it shies away from the over-the-top bloodletting, seduction and sensuality that have become the attributes and pitfalls for other modern-day neck-biters.

Instead, Kostova goes one step further than Bram Stoker did in his original Transylvanian Prince of Darkness novel and gives more historical bite to the real Dracula, Vlad Tepes, a k a Vlad the Impaler, who ruled Wallachia in 1455.

The book is written as a memoir of sorts by a woman who recalls her adventures as a 16-year-old girl. Her father, a university history professor, has disappeared while looking for her missing mother. The father's adviser has also disappeared. The only clue is an ancient book sporting a single woodcut print of a dragon and the name "Drakulya."

Through flashbacks, letters and meetings with historians, the story takes the reader through the temples, mosques, cathedrals and catacombs of Cold War Europe and the eastern United States. Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, England, New York and Italy are presented in intelligent picturesque prose.

Characters don't breathe through a list of descriptions but come alive through written cultural attributes and customs of the countries, cities and territories of that time.

Similar to Tim Lucas' "Book of Renfield: The Gospel of Dracula" and Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles" series, Kostova's book presents the vampire story as a true account. Unlike those other two authors, Kostova tells her vampire story as an in-depth humanities lesson.

Ottoman, Turk, Byzantine and Wallachian civilizations — complete with wars, superstitions, politics, art, customs and architecture — are as much of this story as the young girl's quest to find her father and his adviser and to discover the secret of her mother.

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E-mail: scott@desnews.com