Yeah, I know.  It's another vampire book.  But before you roll your eyes, sigh, and dismiss The Reformed Vampire Support Group as an unnecessary addition to an already overcrowded genre, you might want to give this one a try.  It's smart, it's funny, and it definitely doesn't subscribe to the dark-n-sexy goth chic you find in most vampire novels.

Nina, perpetually stuck at age 15, was turned into a vampire in 1973 and she's been suffering ever since.  The constant nausea and fatigue alone are enough to drive her mad, not to mention having to dispose of all those guinea pig carcasses every week.  Add to that the mundane task of trying to make a living when you are essentially dead between the hours of sunup to sundown and you've got a fairly miserable existence.  No surprise, then, that all eleven of Australia's vampires meet every Tuesday for a weekly support group; being a vampire is stressful. 

And, until now, life as a vampire has also been fairly mundane.  But when one of them turns up dead at the hands of an obvious vampire killer (who else would use a silver bullet and a stake through the heart?), Nina and her friends must find out who killed him unless they want to be next.

(FYI, this is a great audio book!)

And so begins a very warped retelling of the Jane Austin classic entitled, appropriately enough, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance - Now With Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem.  In this version, however, the sleepy village of Meryton has been overrun by a mysterious plague that turns the normally quiet and well-mannered dead into flesh-eating zombies of the most unpleasant sort.  Thankfully, due to the forward thinking of their father, the Bennett sisters are highly trained killers.  Having studied with Shaolin Masters and skilled at slaying zombies in a variety of ways, they are now the primary protectors of Meryton.  Elizabeth, in particular, likes nothing more than a sharp blade for taking out the "unmentionables" during a sporting good fight.

While purists may scoff and take offense at such sacrilege, those willing to loosen up and have a little fun with their classics will delight in seeing Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy join forces to fight the never-ending onslaught of the undead.  Never read the original Pride and Prejudice?  No problem!  With almost all the original text intact in the zombiefied version, now you have!   Well, sort of...

Case in point: The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. This elegant debut novel, over 10 years in the making, is a multi-generational 20th-century search for Vlad the Impaler, the sadistic medieval ruler of Wallachia (today a province in Romania) who was the inspiration of the Dracula legend and that, in this book, still walks the earth today with his undead minions, looking for blood. There are three main threads within this lengthy work. In the early 1970s, Paul, an American diplomat in Amsterdam, recounts to his teenage daughter the 20-year-old story of the mysterious disappearance of and his desperate search for his beloved mentor, Professor Rossi, guided by a bundle of ominous and seemingly fantastic letters written by Rossi twenty years before that, in the 1930s. These letters describe the sudden appearance of a book, blank except for an ornate woodcut on the cover, depicting a dragon. Unlocking the secret of this book ultimately leads first Rossi, then Paul (along with his partner, Rossi's estranged daughter Helen), and finally Paul's own daughter in search of the resurgent "Drakulya." Their quest to solve the riddle of the book and the disappearance of several characters leads the protagonists not only across time but also across the European continent, from Oxford to Istanbul with stops in Amsterdam, the French Pyrenees, Budapest, Bulgaria and (of course) Romania.

What made this book especially appealing to me was that, instead of reading it, I listened to it. Audiobooks have the capacity to really bring to life a good book and this one is especially successful. The narrators are Justine Eyre and Paul Michael, each of whom spoke with numerous distinct voices to match the abundance of characters. Justine Eyre is very believable as the narrator, Paul's daughter, though a bit less so with her cockney-sounding portrayal of her traveling companion, Barley. Paul Michael is especially effective in his portrayal of Paul, Professor Rossi, Helen (who is credibly feminine) and finally Vlad himself, who by the way bore no audible resemblance to Bela Lugosi. There were no sound effects or musical passages...just the voices from these two gifted narrators. And that was more than enough.

Part horror tale, part historical fiction, part travelogue and part Da Vinci Code-esque mystery, Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian is a unique blend of genres that succeeds on every level. Give it a listen.