Popular Culture Review Vol. 19, No. 2, Summer 2008 | Page 61

Evil in the Worlds of D racula and The H istorian 57 The Reach of Evil in Kostova’s The Historian Elizabeth Kostova’s recent comment about Bram Stoker’s “insistence that the evils of history can reach forward into modem life” applies to her own novel as well (Kostova, Foreword xi). As the unnamed (older) female narrator of The Historian writes at the story’s beginning in Oxford in 2008, not only can reaching back into history endanger us, but “sometimes history itself reaches inexorably forward for us with its shadowy claw” (xv). This section, therefore, examines several examples of the reach of evil in the 2005 novel. First, the young narrator’s father Paul discovers a dragon book in 1952; his mentor Professor Rossi discovers his dragon book in 1930, and numerous copies of this antique book are scattered throughout the world. In other words, the evil of Dracula as the son of the dragon is passed on to harm people. Rossi tells Paul in 1952 that vampires are real, that Dracula still lives in the 20th century, and that Paul “might have inherited a curse” through Rossi’s research (48). Although Dracula died in 1476, he fo V