#vampire
Hey, to everyone out there who’s enjoying Dracula Daily, I would like to heartily recommend The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, the best vampire novel since the original (possibly better than the original!).
It is a novel of Dracula - a truly menacing, horrifying Dracula. In an echo of the way Dracula is told via documents - letters, diaries, etc - The Historian also relies heavily on them, from letters to journals to family stories to centuries-old historical documents. It’s told in a nested style through three narrators, all of whom are historians - a young woman in the 1970s, her father in the 1950s, and his thesis advisor in the 1930s - with the letters/diaries/stories of the earlier narrators being experienced by the later ones. In this way, it’s told across three different eras of Europe and gets into all the real historical complexities and context of those periods, such as the Cold-War-era difficulties and dangers of carrying out travel and investigations in eastern Europe. It also draws in vampire mythos from a wider range of places than the original, including a truly fascinating stint in Istanbul.
It moves continually back and forth throughout the three narrators and time periods in a really delightful way, and all of the characters are powerfully engaging. On top of this, it can be a genuinely frightening and chilling read at some points - it’s captured the art of eerie, building horror without gore or cheap scares.
If you like history, or Dracula, and especially if you like both, you are going to love this book.
Happy Halloween
My favorite Western horror fantasy film, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, has one hell of an opening.
Eiko Ishioka’s design for Vlad Dracula’s armor is my favorite vampiric armor design, still to this day. Brilliantly evocative and efficient suit design, worn in what is easily my fav Gary Oldman role… with a comic adaptation by one of my fav US artists, Mike Mignola. So many favorites to be had from this one film.
I was way too young when I saw the film and I loved every damned bloody drop of it.
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