No Sparkly Vampires Here.

I’ve had vampires on my mind lately, probably because they are everywhere: TV, movies, books, Sesame Street…

This is my favorite vampire, Count Von Count, in one of my favorite Sesame Street segments, The Batty Bat.



Anyway, I recently read two kind of serious and creepy vampire books. The first was The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which I read on the recommendation of several people, and the second was Bram Stoker’s Dracula, my classic reading for the month of October.

The Historian is really long, but worth reading, even though I think that at least a third of it could have been edited out without really affecting the story. Basically, it tells the story of a father and daughter and several academics who unwillingly get pulled into researching the history and myths surrounding Vlad the Impaler, aka Dracula.

The story is told from several different points of view, often in long letters, and moves back and forth between several decades and many countries, Even so, it isn't hard to follow.

It is kind of creepy, though. There are vampires, and they are gross. Definitely not all sparkly and appealing like some other writers might suggest.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is often referenced throughout The Historian, so I thought is would be an appropriate follow up.

It begins with an English man, Jonathan Harker, being held prisoner in Dracula’s Transylvanian castle after being summoned there for business. He escapes and makes it back to England only to find that Dracula has also moved there and is terrorizing the people Harker associates with. So, Harker, along with his wife Mina, vampire expert Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, and a few others, set out to destroy the monster which is Dracula.

I really like this one. It was pretty tame for being a “horror” story, but that's all right with me. Supposedly, it is full of social commentary regarding things like progressivism and threats of female sexual expression in the Victorian era. I chose to read it just for entertainment purposes, so I didn’t really look for those themes, although some of them were hard to miss.

However, by the end I was confident that I could kill a vampire if I had to, the process was described often, and I also learned a few good uses for crucifixes and garlic.

Also, I learned that if I ever see a bat fluttering outside my bedroom window, I should not let it in, as it will probably end in gruesome results, or at least the need for a blood transfusion.