Reviewer: Andrea
I received a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
The summary:
In the early 1600s, Elizabeth Báthory, the infamous Blood Countess, ruled Čachtice Castle in the hinterlands of Slovakia. During bizarre nightly rites, she tortured and killed the young women she had taken on as servants. A devil, a demon, the terror of Royal Hungary—she bathed in their blood to preserve her own youth.
400 years later, echoes of the Countess’s legendary brutality reach Aspen, Colorado. Betsy Path, a psychoanalyst of uncommon intuition, has a breakthrough with sullen teenager Daisy Hart. Together, they are haunted by the past, as they struggle to understand its imprint upon the present. Betsy and her troubled but perceptive patient learn the truth: the curse of the House of Bathory lives still and has the power to do evil even now.
The story, brimming with palace intrigue, memorable characters intimately realized, and a wealth of evocative detail, travels back and forth between the familiar, modern world and a seventeenth-century Eastern Europe brought startlingly to life.
Inspired by the actual crimes of Elizabeth Báthory, The House of Bathory is another thrilling historical fiction from Linda Lafferty (The Bloodletter’s Daughter and The Drowning Guard). The novel carries readers along with suspense and the sweep of historical events both repellent and fascinating.
The Review:
House of Bathory is a tale of incestual and sadistic horror, framed by a modern story that mirrors the twisted history until the two are so intertwined it’s impossible to tell where one stops and the other begins. The history in this novel is extensive, sometimes a little overwhelming, but being a history buff, I appreciated the research and detail in the scenes depicting the seventeenth century world of Eastern Europe and the court of Elizabeth Bathory. Lafferty does a great job of interlocking the past and present events, showing how the past leaks its way into our own lives and seeming to support the Jungian discourse of the wheel of life.
This was one of those stories I couldn’t forget. I found myself wondering what the characters were doing—a sign of good novel. However, with twelve plus POVs and 486 pages, this one isn’t for a light, weekend read. With all of that omniscience, I felt I needed a guidebook at times to keep track of the plot.
There were a few episodes which needed more explanation, like a seeming past-life episode that Daisy experiences, and the storyline with Daisy’s father wasn’t foreshadowed enough to create believability. I also wondered about the age range for this one. I first selected an ARC because I thought it fell into the YA historical genre, but while Daisy’s story carries a portion of the plot, it is relatively small, and the language and suggestive content makes it mature.
