Father's tales inspire vampire chronicler

American novelist Elizabeth Kostova knew she had hit on a fresh way to retell the story of Dracula when a childhood memory shot a shiver up her spine. A decade ago, before she began writing The Historian (Little, Brown, $35), she remembered the journeys she took through Europe as a child. In each new city her father, a professor of urban planning, would amuse her with a story about the world's most famous vampire.

"I wondered whether this would make a good structure for a novel," Kostova says. "At the end of each of these tales, the young listener realises Dracula himself is listening to the story. Then I got the chills and immediately began working on the book."

The story is told by Paul, an American diplomat, to his daughter through a series of letters, journal entries and fictional ancient documents, all of which are based on authentic publications. Part of Kostova's gift for storytelling is evident as she unpeels layers of intrigue, imbuing the mission of 15th-century monks with a hugely dramatic flair.

Her Dracula emerges as a figure so obsessed with the past that he lures historians into his master plan to colonise his undead followers throughout the globe. Paul and Helen, a Romanian exchange student, become embroiled in an attempt to rescue Paul's supervisor, an eminent historian, from Dracula's clutches. Their story, set in the late 1950s, takes them into the farthest-flung corners of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.

Kostova's meticulous research revealed that there is a genuine mystery about the burial site of Vlad Tepec, the 15th-century ruler of Transylvania whose brutal methods earned him the epithet of Vlad the Impaler.

"No one knows what happened to his body after his death," says Kostova. "It's a question that's been examined by archaeologists and historians for centuries, so I took this as the starting point of my speculation."

Kostova believes the fascination with Dracula stems from a primitive desire to understand whether death is a permanent state. She discovered the Orthodox church had strict sanctions against the exhumation of bodies, which was common as a way to verify whether someone had really died — or joined the Undead.

Kostova dismisses the idea of any personal belief in the supernatural. "I don't believe in vampires and I have a very scientific outlook on life, but I do believe in the power of myth in our psyches."

Indeed, the characters in her novel — which has been outselling Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code in the United States — approach their quest for Dracula through the accumulated knowledge of previous generations, aghast that they are reduced to stuffing their pockets with cloves of garlic, carrying silver bullets and wearing crucifixes to ward off evil.

The book earned a US$2 million ($2.83 million) advance after going to auction. Kostova, who spent long years working away in odd moments, and taking jobs that ranged from mowing lawns to teaching writing, has shot into the public consciousness.

After stoically enduring a year of gruelling publicity, she seems unfazed by the fuss. Indeed, she has worked hard to ensure her family's privacy — because she has already been besieged with emails from Goths and vampire fans. These ghoulish followers may well have been disappointed by the lack of gore in Kostova's novel. "I promised myself that only a cup of blood would be spilled," she says. Instead, the book is steeped in historical and anthropological detail.

The story is told from the daughter's vantage-point in 2008, and sends Paul and Helen across Europe. Although Kostova had to conjure some visits from her imagination and travelogues, she admits that from childhood she was fascinated with Eastern Europe. As a 7-year-old, she spent a year in Ljubljana, where her father was teaching at the local university.

During that time, Kostova was awed by the setting, coming as she did from the "raw new world". She would take side-trips to many European cities with her father, David. "Dad took me to Venice and Vienna," she remembers. "It was the formative experience of my childhood."

While studying later at Yale, Kostova joined the Slavonic choir. Then, in 1989, she got a fellowship to study village music in Eastern Europe. Kostova arrived with a group of fellow American students, seven days after Bulgaria's Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov had been placed under house arrest.

On that trip, Kostova met her future husband, who became one of the first 100 citizens of Bulgaria to be granted a passport. "If we had met even six months earlier, our relationship would not have survived," she explains, "because the political problems would have been immense and his family would have been in danger. It was a very exciting time to be there, people felt free to talk to Westerners, even in villages."

While witnessing Bulgaria's own "velvet revolution", Kostova remembers seeing people leave demonstrations to gather in the American embassy, where they would watch themselves in live action replay on CNN. "They clearly had a sense of themselves making history."

But Kostova's mission to record traditional music also took her into isolated villages in Bulgaria, Bosnia and southwest Russia, where she witnessed rituals dating back to the Middle Ages. An elegant and engaging storyteller, she sets many scenes against the background of these locations, describing Bulgarian fire-dancers, exotic spreads of delicacies, crumbling monasteries and libraries rich in hidden medieval treasures.

Kostova's interest in her husband's country has inspired her to learn Bulgarian, and she says his relatives are always shocked to hear an American speaking their language. Through them she came to understand that, despite having lived under a dictatorship during the Cold War, people could be relatively happy. They fell in love, got married, bought each other birthday presents and raised their children while the Government was just a backdrop to their lives.

- INDEPENDENT