Word: undead
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...members of races like humans, orcs, trolls or night elves, and then pledge allegiance to one of two factions. But unlike in other fantasy games, neither side is wholly good or evil, and both factions are under siege from a plague that turns its victims into mindless undead...
...Rossi while he was a young scholar at Oxford in the 1930s, contain a fantastical claim: Vlad the Impaler, a despotic 15th century prince who inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula,” really was a vampire—and really was undead...
Kostova successfully fills out these pages through a multi-layered framing device: as Paul and his daughter flit about Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc—brokering peace agreements and possibly being stalked by an undead librarian—our intrepid historian interweaves correspondence and flashbacks to fill us in on Paul and Rossi’s back stories...
...historian’s prefatory note suggests, her story’s competing subplots move inexorably toward a climatic showdown in a crypt. It is no great surprise that when the lord of the undead finally appears, he is the “shadowy claw” of history...
Although the undead prince is undoubtedly the villian of this novel, our response to Dracula is ambiguous. We revile his inveterately cruel deeds, but might we also sympathize with his commitment to History? This is the mark of literary complexity, and it belies our historian’s tendency of essentializing historicism...