But the countess was also a powerful widow holding sway over a considerable inheritance of land and money, and her family’s political allegiances were a problem for the regents. Was she really an unrepentant, psychopathic murderer—or was she simply a political obstacle to the king? Was she really bathing in the blood of her victims, or was she herself the victim of a witch hunt? Such questions haunt the pages of The Countess (Crown, 2010), Rebecca Johns’s lively historical novel about Countess Erzsebet Bathory of Hungary. Johns beautifully reconstructs the complexity of this 17th century scandal and brings alive the woman behind the myth.

When I picked up The Countess, I didn’t know what to expect. I read mostly literary fiction, so I wasn’t looking forward or hoping for a Gothic tale. I knew Johns’s work from her debut, Icebergs, a quiet novel about ordinary people’s struggles to overcome the extraordinary emotional damages of war. I had been so impressed with that novel’s understated emotional power that I decided to give Johns’s vision of the evil countess a try.

From the moment I started reading, I couldn’t stop. This fictional historical memoir drew me in with a voice irresistible for its clarity, intelligence and modern subtlety. Hardly the truculent blood-lusty pervert, Countess Bathory comes across as an intelligent woman who from a young age understands too well the responsibilities laid on her shoulders: to not only preserve the family’s name and riches, but to care for her youngest siblings against political turmoil, war, and shifting political allegiances. In the character’s own words:

For a long time I was shocked by the idea that the fate of the family would fall on me, that my little sister Zsofia would depend on me to find a husband who would love me and protect her for my sake. I could not imagine that any man would love me as my father loved my mother.

Throughout the novel, Bathory juggles the restrictive proprieties imposed on women’s conduct with the ruthless political maneuvers that her status and wealth demand. Her family’s wealth baits jealous enemies and men all too willing to play on Bathory’s heart for political advantage. When Bathory becomes a widow and her children are too young to take over the family estates, she struggles to protect her sons’ and daughters’ inheritance against those who threaten to steal it. Who could fail to sympathize with such a woman?

Countess Bathory / Image from Bathory.org

For most of the book, I sided with Bathory. I admired her self-control, her inner fortitude, and her boundless love for her children. I felt her wounded pride when less then reliable men played unfairly with her. And for most of the novel I believed her to be a woman who had everything but what she most longed for: love or even respect from the men in her life. Even her son, who provides the pretext for the letters that compose the story, fails to visit her or even send a kind message when she’s in jail, waiting for death to end her misery and loneliness.

But, readers must wonder, is the countess innocent? Johns is a masterful psychologist. She takes care to establish clues to Bathory’s possible neurosis early in the novel when the countess recounts witnessing—as a child—the execution of a gypsy man who sold his daughter to slavery. The gypsy man is sewn alive inside the stomach of a dying horse, and is left there to slowly die of thirst, hunger, and infection. The young countess visits him on the hour of his death, refusing him water. As she relates:

[...he] opened his eyes, struggling and cursing. I spit in his face, and the white spittle caught in his mustache and hung there like a bit of spider silk. I was never so satisfied as I was at that moment, watching him suffer.

A poster from *Bathory*, Juraj Jakubisko's 2008 film about the Bloody Countess

The narrative suggests that this disturbing reaction invokes a curse or, at the least, calls bad luck upon her. Far from resonating with hocus pocus, this moment establishes the basis for Bathory’s most profound emotional distress: the fear that if she can’t make a man love her, she will become as powerless as the girl who was sold into slavery. She especially resents the gypsy man’s betrayal of his daughter; betrayal is another theme that resonates with her life tragedies. This event also establishes the environment of superstition that ruled the Middle Ages and became a deadly trap for Bathory.

Later in the novel, it becomes clear that Bathory remains affected by that childhood event; the gypsy’s dying words revisit her during the most traumatic moments of her adult life—and there are many such moments in this novel. The countess is married to a cold, uncaring man, seduced by indifferent lovers, disrespected by the servants, and devastated by the loss of three of her children.

It is so heartbreaking to see Bathory’s affections crushed at every turn that we forget her historical reputation and hope instead for a happy ending. The beatings and the rather creative punishments of the servant girls (she forces one to breastfeed a wooden log) seem at first only a footnote to the more compelling story of her emotional devastation.

Rebecca Johns

Even as the novel begins to unravel the mystery of the servants’ deaths, Bathory is such an eloquent character that it’s easy to ignore even the most obvious clues: a reader could long hold onto the belief that Bathroy was just an unwitting enabler to the perversions of her more trusted servants, to whom she delegated the management of the household.

It is only late in the novel that the reader fully witnesses the ravaging effects of the countess’s emotional damage as it capitulates in her blackout rages. In a riveting scene, Johns unleashes her most brilliant storytelling gifts, bringing us into the fragmented, haunted mind of the countess when she’s under the spell of her most repressed rage, revealing even in that moment of absolute monstrosity a compelling vulnerability:

A cracking noise, like the breaking of stone, and the room grows dim before me, blackens. I am alone in the darkness, and then, as if from a great distance, colors come back to me, sounds, light. There is a girl in front of me, a girl crying. Her nose is bright with blood and her eyes tear, making tracks in the dirt of her face and the blood…How small she looks, how frightened. For a moment, I wonder what her days are like, what love there is for her, whether she feels fear, or anger, or pity, or love. Whom does she love? What have those she loves done to her? There is blood on her face, running off her chin in little spins and rivulets. I’m not sure how it got there.

The real horror of Johns’s version of this historical monster is that Bathory is not only likeable, a woman we would not hesitate to welcome if we’d met her in real life, but, like most serial killers, she is comfortable balancing her dark side with her generosity and sense of justice. The most lasting effect of Johns’s The Countess is the uneasy feeling readers get that there may be a monster within each of us, concealed behind thick curtains of false ethics and self-justifications.

For the reader who seeks sophisticated characterizations and unreliable narrators, Johns’s work is thoroughly satisfying. She constructs a complicated character whose unrepentant confessions reveal the damaged mind of a woman raised to strive for all the most false and superficial values, a woman whose talents and ambitions become so focused on fleeting and unrewarding pursuits that the results can only capitulate in despair or madness. That Bathory refuses to crumble to self-pity is the spring upon which her disturbing late-life behavior feeds. Her fears give way to a mental breakdown that resolves itself, literally, in bloody murder.

By the end of the novel, I felt all the irony and perverted cruelty of Bathory’s punishment. Not only is the countess trapped in her fairy tale archetype of evil, but she also has the unfortunate fate of experiencing—literally—the restrictions imposed upon her gender by her time: she is walled alive inside a tower in her own estates, abandoned and reviled by family and friends.

The Countess is a complex and artfully constructed story about a powerful spirit perverted by oppressing values, political ruthlessness, and disloyalty, capitulating in a morbid slaughter whose realistic rendering is far more frightening than any fantasized demon vampire plot. Rebecca Johns proves that real-life horrors, the horrors of war and mental damage, are far more terrifying than any Gothic fantasy. I bow to Johns for transcending multiple genres and writing yet another eminently compelling story.

Further Links and Resources

- Learn more about Icebergs, Rebecca Johns’s first novel, at Powell’s Books. And pick up a copy of the Winter 2010-2011 issue of Ploughshares to read a story by Johns, “Perpetua in Glory.”

- You can read Laura Valeri’s interview with the author at The Mojito Literary Society, and here is a widely distributed Q&A with Johns, via Reuters.

- On her blog Illiterati, the author offers this fictional interview with Erzsébet Báthory.

- Would your reading group like to talk to Rebecca Johns about The Countess? Fill out this form on the author’s website.

- Bathory is a frequent subject of the arts and popular culture, inspiring novels, plays, films, comics, operas, metal bands, and even toys–like this doll in a blood bath.

- Interested in some cinematic takes on the legend of the Bloody Countess?

• Here is a trailer from Bathory, Juraj Jakubisko’s 2008 film about the countess; Anna Friel stars in the title role.
• And here is a trailer from Julie Delpy’s 2009 film (which she directed and starred in), The Countess:

photo by cafenut (flickr cc)

How do you know when vampire lit has reached critical mass? When it gets an academic conference. Vampire literature is now receiving some scholarly attention with a conference at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK. Despite the smirk factor, the conference—”Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture”— has some serious intellectual heft:

The aim of the conference is to relate the undead in literature, art, and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption, and social change. [...] The irony of creatures with no reflection becoming such a pervasive reflection of modern culture pleases in a dark way. Since their animation out of folk materials in the nineteenth century [...] vampires have been continually reborn in modern culture. They have stalked texts from Marx’s image of the leeching capitalist, through Pater’s Lady Lisa of tainted knowledge, to the multifarious incarnations in contemporary fictions in print and on screen. They have enacted a host of anxieties and desires, shifting shape as the culture they are brought to life in itself changes form. More recently, their less charismatic undead cousins, zombies, have been dug up in droves to represent various fears and crises in contemporary culture.

The conference’s organizer, Dr. Sam George, explains her rationale:

“I wanted to put [the texts] in the setting of a rigorous academic conference on vampire fiction to prove that you can study popular literature in a serious way. When I teach my students 18th-century and Renaissance literature, they sometimes struggle to connect to it. But they’re always talking to me about Twilight and its ilk, and I thought the wealth of subject matter in vampire lit made it a perfect way to study popular literature on an academic platform.”

Scheduled sessions include “The Good, The Gay, and The Glamourous: Modern-Day Reinterpretations of the Vampire Myth in Young Adult Fiction,” “Undead, Unwed, But Not Unread: Vampire Fiction and Chick-Lit,” and “‘You are the most dangerous creature I’ve ever met.’: Female Sexuality as Monstrous in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series.”

And, as if that mashup of vampire + academia wasn’t enough, The Guardian reports that George plans to launch a master’s degree in vampire literature in the fall. The conference’s best papers will be anthologized and used as a textbook for the program.

Before you laugh too hard, Harvard offers an English course on science fiction and Yale’s Near Eastern Languages and Civilization department offers “Egyptian Magical Texts.” Could a class on vampire literature really have been far behind?

Via.

photo by kevindooley (flickr cc)

– The Baltimore Museum of Art is currently featuring an exhibit of paintings — some by renowned artists like Gauguin and Matisse — inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. This is only one event in Nevermore, Baltimore’s year-long celebration of Poe throughout 2009 (in January, Poe would have turned 200). Tonight at the Strand Theatre (1823 N. Charles Street), see David Keltz read/perform as Poe, and afterwards, grab a pint at the Annabel Lee Tavern. For a full list of events, visit Nevermore’s website. (Via NPR)

– Over at The Millions, Ben Dooley suggests curling up with House of Leaves.

House of Leaves doesn’t just frighten. [...] It is a virtuoso effort. Taking full advantage of his medium, Danielewski paints the page like a canvas, exploiting both knife-sharp prose, painfully clever post-modernist narrative devices, and typographical tricks to draw the reader into his tale of horror.

– If visual scares (and social commentary chills) are more your style, check out this week’s New Yorker cover:

*Unmasked* by Chris Ware (cover of the New Yorker, Nov. 2 issue)

– For a so-creepy-it’s-true read, indulge in Adam Kirsch’s essayistic review of the new Ayn Rand biography (thanks, Mom, for forwarding).

– Our definition of scary is now completely turning the corner. Not recommended AT ALL? Halloween book burning at the the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in North Carolina. WTF?! (Via Bookninja) And here’s a link to a video about it, via Inkygirl.

The Glister is neither a straightforward horror story nor an allegory à la Animal Farm, though at times it masquerades as both. The jacket copy bills the book as something like a Scottish version of It: in a blighted industrial town on the coast, “a young boy named Leonard and his friends exist in a state of confusion and despair, as every year or so a boy from their school vanishes. . . . [T]he authorities consider the boys to be runaways. . . . And so it is up to the children who remain to take action.”

The Glister is, indeed, at times horrific. It opens with a series of chilling flashbacks in which John Morrison, town constable, discovers the first of the “runaways”—a mutilated body suspended from a branch and wrapped “in tinsel and bright lengths of fabric, like a decoration or small gift hung on a Christmas tree”—and is drawn into a conspiracy to cover up the murder. But readers expecting a Stephen King-like yarn that leaps from one fright to the next will be surprised. The Glister is not a traditional, tightly plotted page-turner, but rather a meditation—a dark, compelling, and deeply philosophical novel of ideas.

The novel’s setting seems tailored for an allegory of industrial blight. There’s Outertown, “all mock-Elizabethan and ranch-style villas with wide, miraculously green lawns and hedges”; Innertown, “a ghetto for poisoned, cast-off workers” from the now-defunct chemical plant; and finally the plant itself, “acres and acres of dead real estate,” an industrial morass that has destroyed the land around it and the lives of Innertown residents. Outertown prospers because Innertown pays the price for an immense, industrial original sin. (Readers who have driven through Gary, Indiana, on their way to Chicago may recognize the dynamic.) The temptation, then, is to read the Innertown boys’ disappearances into this relationship.

John Burnside / copyright: The Society of Authors

But Burnside is quick to spoil such tidy interpretations. And in many ways, Leonard—who appears a quarter of the way through the novel and narrates most of the pages that remain—is his vehicle for doing so. Precociously intelligent, ruminative, and convinced from the start that some evil is afoot, Leonard is the novel’s engine. Almost immediately, he flips any straightforward allegorical reading of the book on its head: “The thing is, I know everybody says it’s dangerous, that it’s making us all sick, that they should have razed it to the ground years ago and cleared the entire eastern peninsula instead of just leaving it to rot—and that’s all true, I know that, but you still have to admit that it’s beautiful.”

Leonard is drawn to the plant as a moth is to flame—and in part because Burnside, who is also the author of several volumes of poetry, lends his descriptive prowess to his narrator, the novel succeeds at giving his strange infatuation, his conviction that there is beauty amidst all this ugliness, convincing texture and emotional heft.

And yet Leonard is not heroic in the sense that the children of It, or those of any number of similar novels, are heroic. He is too thoughtful, too meditative, even static—a poet, not a detective. This is important to how The Glister works as a whole: Leonard is ruminative and, as the story progresses, increasingly unreliable in ways that deny the possibility of a tightly coiled plot; meanwhile, his poetic sensibility and affinity for contradiction upset any slickly symbolic reading of his situation.

So. All this by way of explain what The Glister is not. What, then, is it?

One answer is that The Glister uses the conventions of the horror genre to weave a dark atmosphere around, and provide the stakes for, questions it poses using an allegorical framework that it ultimately explodes through a resistance, built into its structure and its narration, to articulable answers.

But a better way, perhaps, of describing this remarkable and remarkably strange novel is to observe that, early on, Morrison comes across the body of the first missing body and intuits:

[T]here had been reverence here, a terrible, impossible tenderness—in both the killer and the victim—for whatever it is that disappears at the moment of death, an almost religious regard for what the body gives up, something sublime and precise and exactly equal in substance to the presence of a living creature: the measured weight of a small bird or a rodent, a field mouse, say, or perhaps some kind of finch.

To the extent that The Glister is in an investigation into the murders that set its plot in motion, its ultimate question is not whodunit? but rather an inquiry into the weight, substance, and possible non-existence of that departing finch.

There is, of course, no articulable answer. But this novel isn’t after answers. The Glister —especially in its strenuous and stunning final pages—poses and explores the biggest question of them all with vivid, lyric intensity.

It is, as the novel’s title suggests, a question that concerns beauty and ugliness: does dying mean “walking into this brilliant light, walking into the fire and disappearing into its radiance, as if it had been [our] natural element all along, sparks returning to the light, flames returning to the fire”? Or is it merely as blunt and bloody, as factual and final, as that poor boy’s body, hung in a tree?

Further Resources

- Read an excerpt from The Glister.

- Buy one of Burnside’s books from your local independent bookstore. Click here for The Glister.

- To learn more about John Burnside and his work, visit this page on the British Council’s Contemporary Writers site.

- Read “The Bell Ringer,” a story by Burnside published in the March 17, 2008 New Yorker.

- You can listen to Burnside read several of his poems here at The Poetry Archive.