The Historian

I received Elizabeth Kostova’s vampire novel The Historian for my birthday earlier this spring, and finished it last night. It has been great fun to read. I read Dracula back in 2023, but it seems like this year, for some reason, I have had more exposure to vampire stories, maybe because my Russian Literature professor kept talking about them. If I’m going to nitpick The Historian, (and this could be considered a spoiler) I wonder if everything comes together too nicely in the end. Maybe it’s because I spent the year reading Russian novels that were written to offer commentary on life, but I feel like Kostova could have left The Historian more open-ended and had an even more realistic story, although one that would surely anger some readers.