Catholic Fiction

reviewed by Debra Murphy

I’ve never been a huge fan of the vampire story. As a youngster, I was duly appreciative of the shivers to be had from the old Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee movies that played on television. (Back in Champaign-Urbana, where I grew up, there was a regular Late Show movie once a week called “Way Out,” hosted by a Halloweenified local newscaster, which grounded me in the so-called “classic” movies of the horror genre.) Otherwise, beyond reading the original and obligatory Dracula and Frankenstein novels, both of which struck me as baroque and rather tedious books, I was too much of a scaredy-cat—too impressionable, I suppose, by the disturbing images such stories conjure—to spend much time with the likes of Stoker, Poe, and Lovecraft. 

But later on, two things happened to swear me off horror stories (in general), and vampire stories in particular. 

First, I got a right good scare after watching several horror films that came out in the Seventies, namely The Exorcist, The Omen and a televised version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. By that time, the Lugosi-type vampire seemed more comical than frightening, but I had nightmares for weeks after The Exorcist. Then the more Nosferatu-ish vampire of Salem’s Lot proved so genuinely evil-creepy—Stephen King isn’t the master of the genre for nothing—that I decided my imaginative health would be better fed on other dainties.

Finally, in the early Nineties, came Anne Rice. By then I was a mature enough Christian (and reader) to know that horror is a very “Christianable” genre; indeed, like the folklore from which it springs, there is much in a traditional vampire story that a Catholic can appreciate. But Rice’s Vampire Lestat was no traditional vampire. So much so that after reading the first two novels, in an attempt to understand the craze, I learned to loathe the fictional world Rice created with an intensity I’ve felt only rarely for works of imagination. Given Rice’s recent spiritual shift, her later vampire novels may reflect some development, I couldn’t say; but Interview with a Vampire and The Vampire Lestat seemed to me downright anti-Christian in their mythical heart.  

In its many and colorful cultural manifestations, no doubt seasoned with sundry pre-Christian myths, traditional vampire folklore is nonetheless rooted in the Christian concept of a war between Good and Evil for the heart of man. This concept was seared into the Christian imagination, by way of St. John’s Revelations, as a war between St. Michael the Archangel against the Great Dragon over the fate of a Mother and her Divine Child. In later European centuries, the human St. George, bishop and martyr, imagined as the epitome of Chivalry, took on the angelic hero’s role. The Dragon, meanwhile, at least in some countries (Romania, in particular) was personified by the vampire known as Dracula, or “little dragon”. 

In these traditional vampire tales, the vampire was deadly dangerous. He could be perversely attractive—there is such a concept as “the glamour of evil” in Christian theology—but he was nonetheless manifestly evil, both malicious and malignant. (In other words, a “bad guy.”) The vampire’s power, moreover, could be thwarted by anyone who “put on the armor of God”—by the use of crucifixes and holy water, for instance, and even by sinners, or those who otherwise didn’t much cotton to sacramentals. (Ex opera operato, as it were—“not as the result of the good standing of the celebrant,” as the Wikipedia definition goes, “or activity on the part of the recipient, but by the power and promise of God.”

To put a cap on it, the traditional vampire was nothing if not a Believer. Closer to the spiritual realities and “the next life” than the average man, the vampire knew God existed and that He was the Enemy. The vampire, ergo, could sense and must avoid manifestations of holiness. 

Rice’s Lestat, on the other hand, was a postmodern scoffer, a gothic nihilist. He viewed the realm of religion as powerless and hypocritical—though like every aesthete since Oscar Wilde, he appreciated the trappings of the Old World and the Old Religion. (Rice, like Dan Brown and Steve Barry since, give evidence that few things sell as well as anti-Catholicism dressed in Catholic finery.) Lestat was no more troubled by a crucifix than a rabbit’s foot, and he was not only more powerful, more alive than all those pedestrian bourgeois humans who viewed him with a sort of prejudice akin to racism, he was also way more Cool.

Me, I couldn’t stand Lestat, and everything he represented. 

But the times, they are a changin’. Anne Rice has returned to the Faith of her childhood—has eschewed vampire tales and begun a very promising (and authentically spiritual) series of novels imagining the life of Jesus.

And Elizabeth Kostova, in her first novel, The Historian, has relocated the vampire novel in its proper context: Christian mythology.

Kostova’s book tells the story of an unnamed young protagonist, the daughter of an American historian and diplomat living in Europe, who finds a mysterious book in her father’s study: a very old and sinister book, empty of print but for one page, the central page, featuring a woodcut of a fearsome crowned dragon. The discovery of the book leads the young woman on a quest throughout Europe and the Middle East to uncover secrets from her family’s mysterious past. In the process, she also discovers, to her peril, that her family’s secrets are intertwined with the history of a great evil winding its dragonish way through the centuries, from the fall of Constantinople to the present Age of Terrorism: the history of the “real” Dracula.

As a vampire tale, The Historian harkens back to Bram Stoker’s original as if Lestat had never stepped in to muddy the waters of imagination. For a Christian reader this is good news, as Stoker himself (as Kostova shows in the course of the book) took some pains to base his “modern” tale on genuine vampire folklore.

Kostova takes the brief connection Stoker made between Dracula and the brutal Transylvanian king and Turk-slayer known to history as Vlad the Impaler, and runs with it. (As did Francis Ford Coppola in his movie version of the Stoker book, though I think with far less effect.) Vlad, we must remember, was so vicious that he once, it was said, frightened off an army of invading Turks by impaling thousands of his own people on pikes stuck into the ground along the intended path of invasion. The message to the would-be invaders was unmistakable: If this is what I’m willing to do to my own people, what do you think I’ll do to you? As the story goes, the Turks wisely wheeled round and headed back to Istanbul.

Kostova takes these mytho-historical morsels and whips them into a sumptuous meal of imagined personal and cultural history. I don’t wish to give away more in the way of specifics, for fear of spoiling the fun, except to comment that I was frequently reminded of Tolkien’s linkage of the lust for immortality at any cost—the “sin” at the heart of the War of the Rings—with Kostova’s grand conception of the vampire myth. Too, Kostova’s historical imagination, though not overtly Christian—Kostova, in interviews, describes herself as an agnostic—also suggests some perfectly Christianable “spiritual” explanations for many of the totalitarian atrocities of the last century.

On a strictly literary level, The Historian is a fine example of the horror/suspense genre. Impatient readers may balk at its length and Kostova’s penchant for epistolary narratives replete in scenic and historical detail. Me, I was charmed. The travelogue aspect added the sort of “world-building” element one usually finds only in the better sort of historical or fantasy epic. Frightening as it sometimes was, I was reluctant to leave the rich and colorful world Kostova had created, and would have happily lingered in it longer.

It was an added treat that as a Christian, I never felt that the Christian faith, which plays an intrinsic part of this novel, even though few of its secular-minded protagonists share it, was dismissed or condescended to. On the contrary, one of the novel’s leading themes is that secular-minded or otherwise, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio. Maybe all those “superstitious” garlic-wearing Wallachian villagers we’ve all laughed at, from Bela Lugosi to Mel Brooks, weren’t as stupid or goofy as we thought. When push comes to shove, Kostova seems to be saying—when confronted by certain fundamental evils, particularly that ancient evil thriving in the wicked heart of man—one must sometimes cling, even without understanding, to traditional remedies.

I highly recommended this book—just not right before bed.