History is a Bitch - a weblog by Jeanne Kalogridis

I miss writing about vampires. I read DRACULA when I was twelve, and it remains one of my favorite novels to this day. I have to admit that I had enormously wicked fun writing THE DIARIES OF THE FAMILY DRACUL trilogy.

If you have any interest in Romanian folklore and the history of the sadistic, charismatic prince known as Vlad the Impaler, you would definitely enjoy the trilogy. I got the inspiration for it while reading DRACULA: PRINCE OF MANY FACES, a biography by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. The family tree offered there got me wondering about how -- if one overlaid Stoker's fantasy that Dracula was a vampire -- Vlad would have treated ongoing generations of his descendants. Voila, the first book in the trilogy, COVENANT WITH THE VAMPIRE, was born.

While I was writing COVENANT, I realized I had a story that needed to overlap with the actual events of Stoker's novel -- and so I recast the narrative into Stoker's epistolary (letter-and-diary-writin') style. The story continued in CHILDREN OF THE VAMPIRE and ends with the third novel, LORD OF THE VAMPIRES, which includes the secret diaries of Bram (aka Abraham -- ya think it was a coincidence?) Van Helsing.

In honor of Bram Stoker and vampires and epistolary works, I hereby humbly submit Dracula Blogged.

Dracula's Castle is for sale. At least, if you believe the headlines.

Since I'm a stickler for this sort of thing, I have to point out that the castle in question never belonged to Dracula. Its claim to historical fame is the probability that Dracula spent a couple of nights in its dungeon.

Fact is, the Impaler's real castle, the keep at Poienari, isn't even in Transylvania, but in Wallachia, now southern Romania. Sadly, it was already in ruins in the 1880s, when a landslide inflicted major damage. All that's standing now are some stone walls and a couple of towers.

Which makes the Castle Bran -- even if it isn't the real deal -- look like a pretty good bargain for a mere $78 million. Nice courtyard, no?

...I'm no match for Elizabeth of Bathory. Who was she? Just a woman who liked to kill virgins and bathe in their blood. Seriously. She was a consummate sadist and serial murderer.

According to News for Medievalists, two new movies about Bathory are in the works.

Bathory is accused of indulging in year-round atrocities - in winter, punishing servant girls by dousing them with cold water in the courtyard until they froze to death; in summer, stripping and smearing them with honey to be attacked by insects, and often searing the breasts and genitals of staff with red hot pokers.

Nice.

For those of you who haven't indulged in THE DIARIES OF THE FAMILY DRACUL trilogy, Elisabeth of Bathory is featured as a main character in the second and third novels. For some reason, I felt she and Vlad the Impaler would have gotten on well...