[In the following review, McLaughlin commends The Blood Countess for its historical foundation and commentary on current world events, but pans it for its repetition of themes, poor narrative technique, and sloppy treatment of details.]

Not far into The Blood Countess, Andrei Codrescu's new novel, it occurred to me that this book wants to be The Name of the Rose. Prominent intellectual combines history and mystery, past and present, to popularize complex ideas in the form of a can't-put-it-down page-turner. Indeed, there is much about the ideas in The Blood Countess that is compelling and its narrative is intriguing, but in the end the novel is not as successful intellectually or narratively as one would wish it to be.

The novel, in alternating chapters, tells stories of late-sixteenth-century and contemporary Hungary. The former is the story of Elizabeth Bathory, an actual historic figure, whose reputation as a near monster who bathed in the blood of virgins has survived to the present day. According to the novel, this reputation is both exaggerated (as one character says, "One may drink blood, in the belief that it's an elixir, or suck it, in an excess of passion, but bathe in it? The sticky mess. The quick coagulation.") and an understatement.

Elizabeth is an extraordinary child born into a violent world. Still a baby, she exhibits the abilities to remember and repeat everything she hears and even to mimic the speakers' voices, thus unnerving her maids but attracting her wet nurse, Darvulia, a practicing witch who sees much potential in Elizabeth for subverting the man-made world. Her earliest shaping experience is a peasant revolt at her family's Ecsed Castle, during which she sees her two sisters raped and murdered and after which she sees the rebels forced to eat the roasted flesh of their leader before they are killed. The novel then follows Elizabeth closely from the ages of nine to fifteen as she observes and then participates in a world of contradictions. She is educated by a Catholic monk and Lutheran pastors. She attends the coronation of her cousin, prince of Transylvania, and visits a Pest slum. She is married to Franz Nadazdy but lives alone as he fights perpetual wars. From the world around her, she comes to four conclusions: that because of her position, people will do pretty much anything she wants; that abstractions are worthless and that to understand something, one must observe it; that the human soul is visible only when pain brings it to the surface; and that time, subtly but constantly attacking her body, is her enemy.

These conclusions result in Elizabeth's creating a dark underside to the palace life her position forces her to lead. While during the day she functions as administrator for her and her husband's estates, diplomat with Hungary's conflicted royal families, and pupil to her religious instructors, at night, in her private quarters, she rages at, tortures, and frequently kills the endless supply of peasant maidens Darvulia recruits to her service. Convinced that the maidens' blood restores the youth of her skin, she installs a cage over her bath, in which young girls are pierced to death while their blood showers on the Countess.

Elizabeth finally goes too far. On the last day of the sixteenth century, resigned to her lost youth, she orders all the mirrors in her house broken and thrown out, stands a young church singer in their debris, and has water poured over her, freezing her into a statue representing the effect of time on beauty. The public, religious, and royal outcries are so great that Elizabeth's cousin, the palatine Thurzo, dispenser of justice, is forced to take action. He confines Elizabeth to one of her castles, holds hearings in which the witnesses tell of Elizabeth's deeds and are subsequently put to death, and, while never officially charging Elizabeth with any crime, has her walled into her suite of rooms, leaving only an opening to pass in food.

The contemporary story takes the form of a confession to murder by Elizabeth Bathory's direct descendent, Drake Bathory-Kereshtur. Standing in a New York City courtroom, Drake narrates to the judge (surely the most indulgent judge in history; she makes Lance Ito seem like Roy Bean) stories of his childhood in Soviet bloc Hungary, his emigration to the United States after the failed 1956 revolution, and his return to post-Warsaw Pact Hungary. Sent by the newspaper he works for to report on the capitalist transformation of his homeland, Drake is soon manipulated by forces only some of which he comes to understand. Klaus Megyery, a childhood friend and former secret policeman, summons him, a member of a royal family, to become a representative of a new monarchist party in the politically volatile country. At a gathering of royal descendants, it is decided that Drake has the best claim to be the new king of Hungary. Drake is suspicious that the party is supported mainly by skinhead storm troopers and eventually learns that the party is actually the brainstorm of Klaus's former employers as a means of establishing a fascist government.

Nevertheless, Drake becomes fascinated by the thought of himself as royalty and by the connection between himself and the historically remote yet strangely present Elizabeth Bathory. He develops a companionship with a former lover's daughter, Teresa, who is a historian specializing in the Early Modern period. Through her, he meets Lilly Hangress, biographer of Elizabeth Bathory. Ditching Klaus and his skinheads, Drake and Teresa rent a car and search for his family's estates. But this escape becomes another trap as they are mysteriously guided from estate to estate, to a meeting with a 400-year-old alchemist seeking the secret of perpetual youth, and eventually to a snowbound evening in Elizabeth's chambers in Lockenhaus Castle, where Drake helplessly enacts a ritual sacrifice that apparently returns Elizabeth Bathory to the world just in time for the millennium.

These parallel plots support several interesting and pessimistic theses about the development and state of Western society generally and Eastern European society in particular. Both Elizabeth's and Drake's Hungarys are emerging from long periods of totalitarian culture, the totalized systems of social, political, and intellectual life of, first, Roman Catholicism and, later, Soviet communism. These monolithic systems, by tolerating no heresy, were able to establish virtually unquestioned order and stability for a period of time. But when these periods end, the societies are thrown into chaos. Various monolithic systems war to establish totalizing control; the Roman Catholic Church vs. the Lutheran Church; Christian Europe vs. the Islamic Turks; religious faith vs. science; Western capitalism vs. socialism; fascism vs. democracy. Each of these systems will go to any lengths, including horrific episodes of violence, in order to suppress instability, lack of order, and any relativity that might challenge its exclusive claim to absolute truth.

What Elizabeth learns from the conflicts of her society and what she comes to represent to Drake's society is violence as raison d'ẽtre. That is, for Elizabeth, violence becomes an outward thrust into a chaotic reality, an attempt to objectify and stabilize that reality so that the individual can define herself in relation to it. This novel's unhappy conclusion seems to be that in Elizabeth's world and in ours violence is the necessary response to an otherwise indeterminate reality. Even the systems we might look toward to subvert the evolution of violence in the service of control are implicated in that same evolution. When they get the opportunity (a revolt, a plague, or the breakup of parliament), the exploited lower classes—the peasants and the skinheads—are capable of the same defining violence as the upper classes. And Darvulia and her witches (now they would be ecofeminists), though dedicated to promoting women's arts and powers and to subverting male systems, are active participants in Elizabeth's violence against other women. Elizabeth's return to the world and Drake's seduction into murder seem to offer little hope for release from a pattern of violence against people, animals, and the world. All that has changed from Elizabeth's time to ours is the technology of killing.

What's unsatisfying about all this is the novel's presentation of its ideas. The novel is thematically episodic. That is, an idea is introduced, then set aside as other ideas are introduced. Eventually, we'll come back to the first idea again, but then it's a restatement, not a development of the idea. One gets little sense of the novel's themes modifying or growing as the plots go on and as the ideas come in contact with each other. As an intellectual juggler, the novel can't keep all its balls in the air at the same time.

There are similar problems with the novel's narrative technique. The subject matter ends up not being as absorbing as it ought to be, primarily because of its presentation. The setup of plot points is clunky and, eventually, predictable. At one point we are told that one of Elizabeth's Lutheran tutors has a pet monkey. Many pages later, the monkey is reintroduced, and we are told, "Pastor Ponikenuz felt for his monkey the absolute maximum of affection he allowed himself toward any living creature." The reader reacts, "Oh yeah, he did have a monkey," and, simultaneously, "Whoa! Something's going to happen to that monkey." Indeed, on the next page Elizabeth's pet jaguar (don't ask) bites off its head. And so it goes. Does a young alchemist prepare a beaker of acid? Whoops! There it goes into somebody's face! A novice maid scratches Elizabeth in her bath? Where's that cage? While we are given many incidents, neither Elizabeth's nor Drake's worlds ever become completely present to us.

Connected to this, the novel seems to have a lot of trouble with dialogue. Much of Elizabeth's story is told in indirect discourse, even when it seems that direct discourse would be more appropriate and effective. Drake's first-person narration works the same way. As a result, at any given point, what happened, what was said, and what the characters thought are presented as three different items; they are rarely integrated in a way that connects the reader emotionally to the moment.

There is also some annoying sloppiness in the novel's treatment of details. Fires blaze, then blow out, then blaze again in a matter of paragraphs. Elizabeth is walled into her rooms in 1611 and dies, we are told, five years later—in 1613.

The result of all this is that we never share the other characters' fascination with Elizabeth. We are emotionally distanced from her and increasingly unaffected by her punching and scratching and murdering. I suspect that we are supposed to be simultaneously attracted to and repulsed by Elizabeth, as Drake is, but the novel doesn't pull it off. In fact, Drake, due, no doubt, to his first-person narration, becomes much more real for us and interesting to us than Elizabeth.

The Blood Countess, then, has much to recommend it as a late-summer beach book: its historical foundation is interesting; the incidents of its parallel plots keep one turning the pages; it has much to say about our world. But I can't help wishing that it were better than it is, that its narratives were better accomplished and that its ideas dived deeper.