Breathtakingly suspenseful and beautifully written, The Historian is the story of a young woman plunged into a labyrinth where the secrets of her family’s past connect to an inconceivable evil: the dark fifteenth-century reign of Vlad the Impaler and a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive through the ages. The search for the truth becomes an adventure of monumental proportions, taking us from monasteries and dusty libraries to the capitals of Eastern Europe-in a feat of storytelling so rich, so hypnotic, so exciting that it has enthralled readers around the world.
Dark bleatings, my toothy tribe! I’m talking about a retelling of Dracula (sort of) today. I liked but didn’t love this book, and am not sure where it falls for me on the ‘Like to Love’ scale, because the things I enjoyed I REALLY enjoyed, but this story had a few major let downs for me.
What is this story?
A take on Dracula that approaches the myth, the man, the lore and legend from several viewpoints that span several decades. We have a daughter telling us her story, plus the story her father told her (some of it verbally and some in notes and letters), plus the story of the professor that the father was a student and a friend of. The father befriends a woman who has a family tie to the whole thing, and this story partially, in places, reads almost like a buddy cop escapade as father and lady try to track down the truth about Dracula.
What I didn’t like:
I am not the kind of person that doesn’t enjoy a long story (Stephen King’s IT and THE STAND are two of my favourites of all time), but my dark lord, this story felt too long for me. For what the story ultimately is at its core – a daughter trying to find her father who’s trying to find his friend, wrapped up in the possibility that Dracula is real and at the root of the problem – there just didn’t need to be SO much history. And yes, I know perhaps I should have expected this to read like a history PhD thesis, given the title, but I didn’t. I expected historical fiction but didn’t realise how involved and laboriously detailed the “history” part would be. That’s probably on me.
The pacing is most likely the culprit for why my interest waned quite a bit though – perhaps my main problem was really the pacing rather than the length of the book. I love a slow burn – I’m one of those pretentious twats that salivates over the minute details of the Elevated Horror genre – but this was just too slow. Every now and then, something would happen and I’d think, “Okay, now we’re getting going here!” only for the action and tension to come to a crashing halt and then I’d be back to trudging through another hundred pages before something dangerous cropped up again. And I feel really bad for using the word “trudging” here because the writing is really good, but I honestly had to force myself through to the end from about the 200 page mark onwards.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is also a slow burn but there’s a fairly severe threat throughout the book that keeps me on my toes. If it’s not Harker trying to escape the castle, it’s knowing Dracula is on his way to London, then it’s Lucy in peril, then Mina in peril, while the dudes scrabble for answers and solutions. This felt more like an intense research paper with some odd bits of action thrown in now and then. And I guess my major gripe is that the threat felt so low level for most of the book and even at the end. If these people weren’t in active pursuit of Dracula, then there’d be no danger at all. This is a bit of a contrast to Stoker’s novel because Dracula is the one who kicks off the whole story by buying the London property, having Harker travel to him, and then travelling himself to London.
What I liked:
The parallels to Stoker’s novel. Despite my complaints, this novel very much felt like a respectful, considered, love letter to Dracula. I might not have particularly enjoyed elements of the storytelling, but I do very much enjoy that I could feel the love for the character and original novel coming through. The author also, like Stoker’s novel, used an epistolary format to tell this tale – it’s not entirely epistolary (or is it?), and the format was used a touch more creatively than I normally see it.
I really liked the characters, even Rossi, who we barely see and mostly just hear about. I was most invested in the daughter’s sections, I suppose because they were the most present (literally). There’s a scene when she’s on a train that was particularly tense, and handled with a great amount of restraint that only added to how good it was. I just wish there were more scenes like this one!
The atmosphere slowly builds but is palpable, and I really enjoyed that because I didn’t expect to feel a gothic atmosphere like this in a story where all of the characters are travelling. The author couldn’t build on a specific place to create this atmosphere because of this, so I was impressed.
The Dracula part was fun and I was absolutely dying for it by the time I got there. I feel like it could have been a bit more climactic, though. For such an enormous journey to get there, I do wish there’d been something more explosive. I did, however, like the character. Dracula in Stoker’s novel is very one dimensional, but the version we see here (though we barely see him) felt much more layered.
Overall, I think I’d give this a 3/5, which for me means it was a good book but not one I’d likely read again. I liked it more than I disliked it, is my final verdict. If you’re someone who really enjoys the history side of historical fiction, I think this would be much more to your taste than it was to mine, particularly if you’re a Dracula fan. It’s pretty light on the horror scenes for a horror novel, so it might also be a good choice for horror readers who prefer a psychological build rather than visceral violence.
If you’d like to check out the book or the author, I’ve popped some links below for you:
Bleeeeat!
Happy Goat Horror 
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