‘Historian’ will give you more Dracula lore than the creeps

If you’ve never read “Dracula,” that great, clumsy novel by Bram Stoker, you really should go do it. And don’t think because you’ve seen any number of film versions of the story that you’ve really gotten at its creepy essence.

The vampire legend reaches back to antiquity, but because it’s really about our fear of and fascination with sex, it seems to crop up most in times of repression or anxiety. That may be why it got its definitive treatment from Stoker at the end of the Victorian era, and why the age of AIDS has seen a charnel-houseful of cold-blooded but hot vampires.

Think of Lestat and his cohorts in Anne Rice’s novels, and the broody dudes Angel and Spike and the femmes fatales Darla and Drusilla on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Now Elizabeth Kostova gives us another intrepid heroine, less hip than Buffy but no less determined to stake her claim as an eradicator of evil.

Kostova’s heroine, who remains unnamed throughout the book, is a historian at Oxford University. Thirty years ago, when she was 16, she discovered a strange old book in her father’s library. All the pages were blank except the ones in the center, which showed an image of a dragon bearing in its claws a banner with the word “Drakulya.”

Her father, whose name is Paul, tells her that when he was a graduate student, the book mysteriously showed up one night in his library carrel. It spurred him to research the historical Dracula (the name comes from the Romanian for “dragon”), Vlad Tepes, a 15th-century feudal lord with an unsavory reputation for torturing his serfs and impaling his enemies alive on stakes.

When Paul showed the book to one of his professors, Bartholomew Rossi, he learned that Rossi possessed a similar book and had tried to trace its origins. What Rossi learned convinced him that “Dracula – Vlad Tepes – is still alive.” A few days after telling Paul this, Rossi disappeared, leaving traces of blood in his office.

So Paul began a quest to find out what happened to Rossi, which led him to join forces with a woman named Helen, who claimed to be the professor’s unacknowledged daughter.

The narrator is fascinated, not least because her mother, whom she never knew, was named Helen: “I did not dare repeat the name aloud…she was a topic my father never discussed.”

But before she can hear the rest of her father’s story, she awakes one morning to find a note from him: He’s been “called away on some new business,” and he wants her to wear a crucifix and carry garlic in her pockets.

No self-respecting heroine is going to leave it at that, of course. And so we get three related stories all mixed up together: the narrator’s search for her father, his search for Rossi, and Rossi’s own quest for the truth about the undead Vlad Tepes. These stories, set in three different eras (the ‘30s, the ‘50s and the ‘70s), take us to France, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary.

Will she find her father? What happened to Rossi? Is Helen really his daughter? Is she really the narrator’s mother? Is Dracula really still with us – and if so, what’s to be done about it?

And will you care enough to keep reading for more than 600 pages?

Sure you will. Vampire stories are irresistible, and Kostova has stuffed hers with arcane history and colorful locales. “The Historian” is the kind of book you won’t put down – but you may not be glad you picked it up.

It is Kostova’s first novel, and it’s said to have taken her 10 years to research and write. As a result, it feels overextended, and there are so many digressions – stories within stories within stories – that the pacing goes slack, giving you time to wonder, for example, how her characters can recollect, in precise detail, events and conversations that took place years earlier. And when you ask that, the illusion goes poof.

But worst of all, Kostova forgets what made “Dracula” such a grabber. It’s the Count who counts, and Stoker – with the help of actors from Max Schreck to Bela Lugosi to Gary Oldman – made him the stuff of our nightmares.

Kostova often seems more interested in giving us lore about the historical Dracula and in touring Eastern Europe than in giving us the creeps. By the time Dracula himself shows up, we’ve almost forgotten why we should be scared of him.

Buffy would take this guy out with a pointed stick and a wisecrack, and it wouldn’t take her 600-odd pages to do it.