The Blood Countess A Novel

A Hungarian-American journalist confronts the beauty and terror of his aristocratic heritage in this suspenseful chronicle of murder and eroticism

Turmoil reigns in post-Soviet Hungary when journalist Drake Bathory-Kereshtur returns from America to grapple with his family history. He’s haunted by the legacy of his ancestor, the notorious sixteenth-century Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who is said to have murdered more than 650 young virgins and bathed in their blood to preserve her youth. Interweaving past and present, The Blood Countess tells the stories of Elizabeth’s debauched and murderous reign and Drake’s fascination with the eternal clashes of faith and power, violence and beauty. Codrescu traces the captivating origins of the countess’s obsessions in tandem with the emerging political fervor of the reporter, building the narratives into an unforgettable, bloody crescendo.
 
Taut and intense, The Blood Countess is a riveting novel that deftly straddles the genres of historical fiction, thriller, horror, and family drama.

“The Blood Countess is a wonderful and accurate re-creation of history by a very knowledgeable author. A page turner!” —William S. Burroughs
 
“The Blood Countess will frost your plasma, curdle your goulash, and stir your nightmares with a golden shiv.” —Tom Robbins
 
“Beautifully written and meticulously researched; Codrescu has woven together Hungarian history, politics, psychology, and religion . . . in a book of high gothic drama.” —Entertainment Weekly
 
“I will defend Codrescu’s very un-American style of novel writing. We have too few serious magical writers in this vein as it is (the best of Gore Vidal comes to mind), and most of our fantasists reside, perhaps against their will, in a sci-fi ghetto where mythical reinterpretations and outright perversions of American life are allowed as long as there’s a spaceship or lurid alien gracing the paperback cover.” —Chicago Tribune