Horror walks a strange path. It weaves in and out of the shadows of society touching on taboo, outrage, disgust, fear, rage, sickness and sometimes titillation. Horror presents us with the most uncomfortable aspects of terror and human nature. Really good horror will have a basis in reality or a belief system. Pure evil is believable. But . . . it can be taken so far that it’s preposterous.
While helping a friend pack for moving day I stumbled across a copy of Andrei Codrescu’s The Blood Countess
For those not familiar, Elizabeth Bathory was a 16th century Hungarian Countess. A member of the powerful royal family, she was a land owner in her own right and one of the most wealthy women in Hungary, Transylvania and the Holy Roman Empire. She was also a supposed sadistic tyrant rivaling the legacy of Vlad the Impaler. Obsessed with beauty and defying time, Bathory is most famous in our modern culture for bathing in the blood of virgins in a desperate bid to retain her youth. Accused as a murderess of approximately 600 peasant and minor noble women, Bathory was finally arrested and tried upon the testimony of 300 plus witnesses. Bathory was confined to one of her castles where her death conveniently wipe away a very large debt owed to her by the King of Hungary. She was accused of torture, mutilation, vivisection, biting off the flesh of victims, murder and sexual abuse.
Codrescu
In Codrescu’s hands, it’s not horror so much as twisted pornography. Codrescu paints an overly vivid and sometimes distractingly convoluted picture of Bathory’s youth focusing almost exclusively on sexual perversion with a bit of torture and death thrown as perfunctory spice. It felt like Codescru added the “blood” to the Blood Countess as only a matter of obligation when he would rather spend his time describing pedophilia, incest, rape, bestiality and a number of other fantastically sordid situations to satisfy his own objectives. In fact there was no actual bathing in blood at all. Just a glossed over blood shower. The story itself was a rather weak accounting of the Countess’ youth intermingled with her deranged descendant’s confession of murder, rape and insanity to an American court, which bears little meaning to any of the happenings of Bathory except to plump up an otherwise short piece of smut. Once Bathory leaves the sexually perverse age of 14 we’re rushed through Bathory’s later, and historically more prolific murdering years to a crescendo that fails to bring any sort of closure and leaving out so much historical intrigue. Codrescu briefly discusses Bathory’s first child and completely neglects the fact that she had five more children. Little omissions like this makes the historian in my cringe. Especially to read others reviews of how this is fabulous Historical Fiction.
Contemporary painting of Elizabeth Bathory
Another irk I had was that every single character. Every. Single. One. Sounded exactly the same and completely devoid of any weight or substance. It was bland. Even worse, the victims were faceless, soulless husks with no development that would elicit any sort of emotional response from the reader. It also bothered me that there was zero development. The nine year old Elizabeth sounded exactly like the 20 year old Elizabeth, who sounded exactly like the 50 year old Elizabeth. The entire story hinged on the personal outrage of the reader at the horrible sexuality and brutality of a child. The outrage is not contained in the book itself, the story is too coldly clinical for that. The outrage is housed solely in the reader. Depending heavily on the reader’s values and mores to engage the horror.
In the end, the horrific personage of Elizabeth Bathory is a convenient outlet for an exercise in demented sexuality by Codrescu, yet depriving the reader of a true appreciation for truly horrible history. Codrescu, a NPR commentator is also a well received, critically acclaimed poet and it shows in his flowery, often overly developed prose, that miraculously boiled down to very little meaning and even less artistry. Maybe I’m too simple to understand the greater means of such a great poetic and philosophical mind, but I’m pretty sure Codrescu developed the disturbing details of The Blood Countess by writing down all the horrible things he could possibly think of and then mashing the ever-loving hell out of them until it resembled a story. I’ve read better porn and I’ve read better horror. Stick to the poetry Mr. Codrescu and leave the horror to people who understand it and its affects on human emotion.
Please let it be known I did not recommend this book. You just happened to find it in the horror section in my library.
You’ve been absolved. It wasn’t the worst book I’ve ever read and it was affecting enough to evoke an emotion from me… mostly disgust.