Framing Device: The heroine's parents' letters, which basically tell around 75% of the story.Or Is It?: Years after Dracula's apparent death, the narrator receives one of his dragon books, suggesting that either he's resurrected, or someone else is restarting his activities.

Driven to Suicide: Helen mentions that there are a lot of folk songs about young women throwing themselves off cliffs or otherwise committing suicide to avoid being taken into Ottoman harems, and Helen herself jumps off a cliff to avoid Dracula, although she survives.

Doorstopper: The reason some people passed up the book, because 600+ pages is long no matter how you look at it.

Doom as Test Prize: Dracula leaves arcane clues to his existence and whereabouts and then vampirizes and enslaves anybody talented enough to follow them.

At the end he remembers and Helen is able to forgive him.

Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Rossi was made to forget that he ever met Helen's mother.

Big Damn Heroes: Master James and Helen at the end.

Badass Bookworm: Many, many characters.

Adults Are Useless: Absolutely, totally averted.

This novel contains the following tropes: Or any other historians, for that matter. Not to be confused with the academic journal of the same name.

And thus some consider it to be the vampire book we all passed up.Īs a reminder: this is not a horror novel. The Historian is Elizabeth Kostova's debut novel, published in 2005 when the world was in the middle of Twilight-mania. While she travels through the capitals of Europe to find him, she reads some letters of his that he's left behind, and slowly unravels the truth about her father's past, her missing mother, whom she had previously presumed dead, and her whereabouts.īut what does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with anything? The answer to this, and the questions put up by her father's letters are found by the narrator as she travels from dusty libraries in Amsterdam to major cities all over Europe. Growing up with him, she loves history as much as he did, and doesn't believe a word of it. The narrator's calm, peaceful life in Amsterdam is disrupted when her historian father has mysteriously disappeared, saying he's going to find her Missing Mom. The narrator becomes increasingly interested in the story of Dracula. Upon hearing her father's explanation of the book, she learns about his travels to Istanbul and meeting Helen, his adviser's beautiful daughter. (And then some are all of the above.) And then there are those vampires that manage to cause such a ''stir'' in some circles.Ī story within a story, The Historian chronicles the adventure of a young nameless 16-year-old girl who finds an old vellum-bound book in her father's library. Others are portrayed as those you see on television played by Bela Lugosi.

The historian kostova