The story entwines the events of three generations of genius historians/archivists who each receive a mysterious and ominous gift: an obviously ancient book completely blank but for the two center leaves. Printed there is a crude but menacing image of a dragon with wings spread, tail looped, and banner reading "DRAKULYA." The story follows these individuals' research attempts to discover why they were gifted these books, whether or not Dracula/vampirism exists, where to find Dracula, how to stop him, and how to deal with the consequences of their discoveries.
Spoiler Alert: I'm going to talk about specific likes/gripes at this point. One of the most enjoyable aspects of this book is the number of places to which it transports the reader: Boston, Amsterdam, Oxford, Istanbul, Romania, Italy, and the list keeps going. But the constant gushing about how beautiful everything is gets a little tiring. We get it: Europe's great. Everything's great. Also, towards the beginning of the story, the author elects to give Slovenia's capitol city, Ljubljana, a faux name (its old Roman name: Emona) to "sheild it a little from the sort of tourist who follows doom around with a guidebook." Not only is this a little insulting to her audience but she makes it so easy to figure out which city it is in reality that I'm not sure I understand why her editor had her keep it in this final version. Additionally, she makes no attempts to disguise the place names of the remainder of her story's settings. It's gimmicky. It also seems like the only time she is writing for the sort of person who would become such a tourist.
Much later, the characters do encounter Dracula, a thing/person who has lived/survived for over 500 years. In this book he is still wearing fifteenth-century clothes and obsessing over the evils of the Ottoman Empire. Mmmmkay. Here is a person who spent his entire life having to adapt to an ever-changing world: now he's a Turkish prisoner, now he's a Wallachian prince, now he's a Hungarian prisoner, now he's a Wallachian prince and finally--he even changes his own species. Don't you think he'd change his clothes? And maybe find a different hobby besides hating Mehemed II? It's almost like the author got to this point and simply ran out of oomph.
Dracula, we learn, is the historian that the title refers to. He has spent all of his energy "perfecting evil," as he says, by amassing a library. I guess it's a really evil library. It has several volumes on torture, then skips 3 centuries, has a volume on Napoleon, skips one more century, and has an early copy of Mein Kampf. He also expresses an interest in nuclear warfare--as if it were current world news. It was around 1956 at that point. We also discover that he has orchestrated the gifts our historians received at the beginning of their journeys in order to, basically, pique their interests in him and see how far they'll search for him. He goads them on by killing off people who are special to them and then expects them to be happy to join up. Their reward is to spend the rest of eternity cataloging books and expanding the library. In order to do what?!? Dracula says that he is interested in the mass-killing that can be accomplished with contemporary weapons but makes no claims to have killed anyone in the past 500 years besides those who have, most unfortunately, made it onto his menu. Not that scary. It certainly would have been more interesting if the author had had Dracula involved in the research of war technology--whether as a sponser or in disguise--and had it seem as though he were pulling the strings behind the world's tragedies.
Something else I liked: the way the author wove the issues surrounding the Cold War into the plot. We know that the Nazis went so far as to research the occult in their endeavor to leave no unturned stones on the path to European domination. I liked that she had her communist governments doing the same thing. The only problem with this that she didn't gloss over is the inherently religious part of vampirism and the inherently atheist part of communism. I think it would have been simple to resolve. In fact, her characters are mostly atheist but use religious symbols and artifacts successfully in their defense against vampires. This does make her characters' atheism seem shallow but it is not overly obtrusive.
Also, we are meant to believe that nearly all of the principal characters have genius or near-genius level I.Q.s. However, I think the largest word this book used was "perspicacity." I'm just saying...
I also disliked the epilogue but I'll leave that for you read on your own. Another gimmick.
Anyway--will this book be studied by high schoolers? No, but it is a fun summer read and worth picking up.
Until next time...
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