SOURCE: "Blood & Guts in Budapest," in American Book Review, Vol. 17, September, 1995, pp. 16, 23.

In the following review, McLaughlin commends The Blood Countess for its historical foundation and commentary on current world events, but pans it for its repetition of themes, poor narrative technique, and sloppy treatment of details.

Not far into The Blood Countess, Andrei Codrescu's new novel, it occurred to me that this book wants to be The Name of the Rose. Prominent intellectual combines history and mystery, past and present, to popularize complex ideas in the form of a can't-put-it-down page-turner. Indeed, there is much about the ideas in The Blood Countess that is compelling and its narrative is intriguing, but in the end the novel is not as successful intellectually or narratively as one would wish it to be.

The novel, in alternating chapters, tells stories of late-sixteenth-century and contemporary Hungary. The former is the story...