Bitten by vampire bug

"The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova (Little, Brown, $25.95).
WASHINGTON -- 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 young women in their sleep.
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 best-seller lists.
Where it all began ...
An academic who taught urban and regional planning, her father 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."
As a teen-ager, she also read about Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure at the root of the Dracula legend.
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, hiking in North Carolina, she remembered her father telling those stories. She thought that might be a good structure for a novel, but why would he be telling them? Then she thought: What if the girl listening realizes that Dracula, too, is listening?
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 make his undead fictional counterpart look saintly.
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.
This freed her to imagine the rest of the story.