The Writer Bitten by the Vampire Bug

Let's say you're schlepping your 7-year-old daughter around the great cities of Europe and you need to tell her some

stories to keep her entertained. Bet your first choice wouldn't involve blood-sucking reanimated corpses who savage the necks of beautiful young women in their sleep.

Well, that's where you'd be wrong. Because without those thrilling tales to undeaden her imagination, your daughter won't grow up to be Elizabeth Kostova, author of "The Historian" -- a 642-page first novel about Dracula that sold at auction for $2 million, got translated into 30 languages and shot straight to the top of national bestseller lists.

In town recently for a reading at Politics and Prose, the novelist -- who is 40 and worked for 10 years on her book before she sold it -- reminisces about the trips to Venice and Vienna she took with her father as a child. An academic who taught urban and regional planning, he was big on the history of cities. A lover of "those great Hollywood classic films," he was big on Bela Lugosi, too.

"He told me one of those stories on the Piazza di San Marco," she says. "So when I see a picture of Venice, I think of Dracula."

The Hollywood version derives from Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic chiller, but Kostova's fascination didn't stop there. As a teenager, she also read about Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure at the root of the Dracula legend. "If somebody said Dracula, I had a tendency to pay attention," she says.

Kostova always knew she wanted to write. After graduating from Yale, she traveled in Eastern Europe and met the Bulgarian who would become her husband. Returning to the United States, she wrote short fiction, essays and poetry, "really working hard at it" but making the pittance that little-known writers normally make.

Enter Dracula, again.

Eleven years ago, while hiking in North Carolina, she suddenly remembered her father telling his little girl those stories. She thought: That might be a good structure for a novel. But why would the father be telling them? Then she thought: What if the girl listening realizes that Dracula, too , is listening?

"I got out my notebook and wrote down seven pages of notes," she says.

The historical Vlad the Impaler, who ruled the principality of Wallachia in what is now Romania, was a national hero who fought the encroaching forces of the Ottoman Empire. He was also a mass murderer whose execution methods -- suggested by his nickname -- make his undead fictional counterpart look saintly by comparison.

Kostova's novel blends the real and fictional villains. She had a "eureka moment," she says, when she realized that no one knows what happened to Vlad's remains.