Brendan’s Alternate Tagline for The Blood Countess:
#FreeBáthory
Quick synopsis:
The true story of history’s most prolific female serial killer, Elizabeth Báthory. (Ahem, ALLEGEDLY.)
Fact for Non-History People:
15% of U.S. serial killers are women.
Fact for History Nerds:
The most prolific female serial killer by confirmed victims is Jane Toppan with 31.
My Take on The Blood Countess:
I came for the most prolific female serial killer of all time, but I stayed for the lessons in Hungarian politics. The main takeaway being that if you were a woman with land, someone was probably going to take it from you one way or another.
If you hop over to Wikipedia and search on female serial killers, the queen (to be factually correct, she was a countess) of them all is Elizabeth Báthory. She holds the (turns out rather dubious) “honor” of being the murderer of somewhere around 600 young girls. She reportedly enjoyed torturing them and bathing in their blood to stay young. I am being a bit flippant with the subject here because, well, none of it was real. Author Shelley Puhak tells us right off the bat in her fantastic The Blood Countess.
I thoroughly enjoyed Puhak’s previous non-fiction work, The Dark Queens, (as well as her award-winning poetry but that’s beside the point) and The Blood Countess proves this was no fluke. This is the type of book where you can feel the sheer amount of work that went into gathering the information, getting it right, and then presenting it in a way that a reader won’t get lost like they are in the forests of Transylvania. There are many vital characters, constant backstabbing, and of course religious strife that seems to never end. Through it all, Puhak shows us just how the legend of Báthory spun out of control and what the real truth probably is. I highly recommend it.
(This book was provided as an advance reader copy by NetGalley and Bloomsbury Publishing.)
Verdict:
Fantastic from beginning to end. Buy it here!
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