Countess Erzebet Bathory was a legendary sadist, a torturer and murderer who bathed in the blood of young women to keep herself beautiful.
Psychologist Betsy Path, a remote descendant of the Countess, is treating a young Goth teenager, Daisy Hart, who has haunting dreams and mysterious choking episodes. When Betsy’s mother is kidnapped by the current Count Bathory, Betsy, her ex-husband John, Daisy, and Daisy’s sister Morgan all find themselves drawn into the Count’s insane plot to revive his infamous ancestress.
The reader is also given the story of how Countess Bathory is arrested and brought to justice through the work of her scarred maidservant Zuzana and her childhood friend, the horsemaster Janos, who may be a Taltos, a mystical enemy of Bathory evil. As the two tales intertwine, they connect in ways that threaten the lives of Betsy, her mother, Daisy and Morgan. Can they ever make it from darkness to the light again?
This is a dark and intriguing vampire story, told in two time periods. The vicious evil of the Bathories, both the medieval Countess and the modern Count, is chillingly portrayed, and Lafferty deftly blurs the line between vampiric evil and psychotic insanity, leaving the reader to decide which is at work here. The double storyline works to elucidate the plot without revealing too much too soon, while deepening the reader’s understanding of the politics and psychology in play. Even the most minor characters are three-dimensional personalities, with believable motivations and emotions. The book is well-researched, portraying a real, detailed, and substantial-feeling medieval world.
Sometimes the requirements of the tale lead to characters behaving less intelligently than they should – Daisy, for example, newly arrived in a strange country, and having been warned that young women her age are being kidnapped and brutally murdered, willingly goes along with a stranger to visit a tower at night, with predictable results. Those readers with sensitive stomachs should also be warned that there are numerous scenes involving graphic torture, blood and gore.
This is a well-written, dramatic tale, with substantial appeal for those who enjoy a good Gothic vampire tale as well as those who love historical fiction.
Reviewed by Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader