The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova may have been my favorite book of 2018 for its detail, complexity, and the blending of the history and folklore of Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula.

It kicked off a series of Dracula books for me in 2018. Dracula is a fascinating legend to begin with, and as I said previously, I did a lot of “scary” in 2018. The Historian isn’t a typical “horror” story but there are a lot of elements of it, and it’s definitely a suspenseful book. I’d put it mostly under historical fiction, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

The Historian is a story within a story. It’s actually a story within a story within a story, but it begins to get confusing if you think about it too hard, and it really wasn’t a confusing book. Don’t get me wrong – it was long and quite dense. I did the audiobook version and it was 24 hours? 26? It was long. But it wasn’t confusing.

The unnamed narrator, in Amsterdam in the 1970s, finds a vellum book with a woodcut of a dragon associated with Dracula, and she asks her father, Paul, about it. He explains that he found it in his study carrel during his time as a graduate student in the 1950s. He took it to his mentor/advisor, Professor Bartholomew Rossi, and discovered Rossi had also found one when he was a graduate student in the 1930s. Rossi researches Vlad Tepes, the Dracula myth, and these mysterious books. Rossi travels as far as Istanbul, but unexplained circumstances and characters send him back to his graduate work at the university and Rossi, in the 1950s, informs Paul that he believes that Dracula is, somehow, still alive. After meeting with Paul, Rossi disappears.

There are smears of blood on Rossi’s desk and on the ceiling, but other than that, everything is in place. The police suspect run of the mill foul play, but Paul is certain that something involved in research into the Dracula legend is to blame for his disappearance.

The majority of the book follows the 1950s story, with cuts in and out to the 1930s and 1970s storylines, with all three of the main characters – the narrator, Paul, and Rossi – researching the Dracula myth in Europe and eventually converging later in the book.

As I said, the blending of history and folklore in this story made it one of my favorites of 2018. There’s tons of cool info about Vlad Tepes, the Dracula legend, and Europe in general. I loved the story surrounding the narrator, Paul, and Rossi as well as the ambiguous ending.

The Historian was one of those books that made me sad it was over, like it should have kept going, like there was even more story that could have been told. It was so good that I jumped on Kostova’s The Swan Thieves, which ended up being one of the books I returned early and didn’t finish last year. I don’t know if Kostova is a one hit wonder, but if she is, I very much enjoyed and highly recommend this one hit. If you enjoy history and folklore like I do, I think you’ll like The Historian as well.

Tagged: authors: elizabeth kostova, books: this historian, genre: historical fiction, genre: history, genre: horror/terror