SOURCE: "Mistress of Terror and Torture," in the Washington Post Book Review, Vol. XXV, No. 32, August 6, 1995, pp. 3, 10.

In the following review, Drew lauds Codrescu's The Blood Countess for making comprehensible to the West the hatred and violence of modern Eastern Europe by exposing its bloody past.

What makes Andrei Codrescu's voice on National Public Radio so distinctive is the way it mixes American vernacular with a Transylvanian accent so rich it conjures up sophisticated counts about to do evil in gloomy hilltop castles. Happily, his new novel skillfully exploits this cultural bilingualism. In it, Codrescu weaves the story of an infamous 16th-century Hungarian countess who murdered, and bathed in the blood of, some 650 young girls with the trials of her modern-day American-immigrant descendant, who has recently returned to post-Communist Hungary. Based on extensive research in old Hungarian archives and on Codrescu's keen impressions of contemporary Eastern Europe, the...