Beware of Vampires Eating Cheese

Last night I finished reading the vampire novel The Historian. I stayed up late into the night several nights finishing it--being the heavy read that it was and all. I will give more of a review further on in my post. But a funny thing happens when I read into the night like that--I dream about the story. And last night I had the most interesting dream yet.

In the actual book, if a person is bitten three times by a vampire, they become a vampire also. So, in my dream, I was in a hospital room visiting someone gravely ill, I don't know who it was. The whole time I was there, I was waiting very impatiently for Thomas. I was really worried about him. Suddenly he rushed in and sort of side-whispered to me, "It's really bad." And then I knew the worst. I looked at his neck and sure enough, there was a bite mark. I became very panicked in my dream and started begging him to know how many times he had been bitten. "Three," he said very solemnly. Well, you can imagine my devastation, knowing that my husband had become a part of the damned for eternity. He wanted me to get away from him because he was afraid he would eat me. So I left him to find a cure for his vampirism. I knew there had to be a way to de-vampire him.

After being alone for a while, I decided that I needed to talk to Thomas so that the two of us could figure out a solution. I found him sitting on a park bench with a platter of cubed cheese, you know the kind they have at parties and stuff, on his lap. I could see the cheese-lust in his eyes as he devoured the cheese one by one using a toothpick in each hand. (I am laughing pretty hard right now!) But in my dream I was still devastated. I approached him and he looked at me and started shouting at me to leave because he didn't want to eat me. But even as he spoke, he was still eating the cheese. I asked him where his fangs were, I noticed he didn't have any. His response was that he broke them off with a towel. Maybe that was so it would be easier for him to eat his cheese with toothpicks. Who needs fangs when you have toothpicks?

Anyway, so I was thinking about this dream, because I woke up really scared and so happy that Thomas was next to me and that he wasn't a cheese-eating vampire after all! And after much thought, I have finally interpreted my dream! That brings us to my review of the book.

SPOILERS!
The book is about a grad student searching for his adviser who had been abducted by Dracula. He meets a girl who happens to be the adviser's daughter. The two of them go on a rivetting search for the tomb of Dracula. I really loved that part of the story. It was very interesting with detailed descriptions of different parts of Europe. Granted, some of those descriptions really bogged me down and I started skimming those parts. There was also a lot of history about the Byzantine and Ottoman empires. I don't know how much of it was factual, but it was interesting at times. I ended up skimming a lot of that too though.

My biggest complaint is that Dracula's motivation for tracking and abducting scholars around the world was because he wanted to have the most historically valuable library in the world and he needed to find a servant worthy to catologue his books. Really? That would be Dracula's motivation? At one point Dracula kills the grad student's cat. Seriously, this isn't the Dracula I have come to know and love. I think he would have gone straight for the grad student. It was a little ridiculous to me and I just couldn't buy into it. Which is a shame because I loved most of the characters and the search for the adviser and I loved the creepy ending.

So I decided the premise of the book was just too cheesy for me. Get it? Cheesy!