SOURCE: "Haunted in Hungary," in The New York Times Book Review, Vol. CXLIV, July 30, 1995, p. 9.

In the following review, Auerbach faults Codrescu for his depiction of Elizabeth Bathory and other female characters as either virgins or vamps in The Blood Countess.

In his buoyant 1993 film, Road Scholar, the Romanian expatriate Andrei Codrescu emulated the American odysseys of Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac. Stopping along the way west to scrutinize quaint national divinities, from hamburgers to crystals, Mr Codrescu, grinning in his red Cadillac, fulfilled his immigrant's pledge "We were done with the Old World, liberty was ours."

In his new novel, The Blood Countess, a Hungarian emigrant goes back to his bloody Old World, with no red Cadillac in which to escape crazy faiths. Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a journalist in America, returns to an "anxious and unsettled" Budapest swarming with skinhead fascism, anti-Semitism and medieval magic from the fairy...