Elizabeth Bathory

by Kimberly L Craft

[Terri M. LeBlanc]

This book has been on my wish list for the longest time—2011 to be exact. And thanks to my #otspsecretsister, who so kindly purchased the book for me, I was able to finally read it.

Elizabeth Bathory: A Memoire is a quick read clocking in at 146 pages. It only took me a couple of days to read. It was interesting, as I didn’t know much about Bathory, beyond the legends, prior to starting the novel. This book is strictly fiction. Craft is known for her non-fiction research on Bathory and decided to take a crack at telling a fictionalized account of Bathory’s story.

The book fell short for me on two points.

The layout. Normally I am able to get past this, but Craft seemed to struggle with remaining consistent in using different typefaces and formats to indicate a change in time and change in point of view. It became confusing at times to determine who and when.

More history. Craft is known for her translation of many documents related to Bathory. I wanted more history, more details about aristocracy in Hungary because once Bathory was finally arrested for her crimes more people were thrown into the mix and it was hard to keep them straight. If they had been introduced, especially since close family friends arrested her, it may have leant more gravitas and suspense to the closing scenes. This is a work of fiction, why not invent the conversations they had that convinced them to finally confront and arrest the Countess?
If Elizabeth Bathory: A Memoire had been longer I probably would have abandoned it. While the story was interesting it lacked the meat to make me want to explore Bathory’s story further. There is definitely potential in Bathory’s story—Wikipedia sites The Guinness Book of World Records stating she is the most prolific female serial killer—this short novel failed to take advantage of that potential and imagine what was happening deep between the lines of personal and court documents that have survived.

P.S. I’ve spent a good amount of time exploring the spelling of memoir in the title. I’m not familiar with this spelling and dictionary.com does not list this spelling either. If there were an accent over the first e it would be French, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense since the characters are Hungarian. Just another minor formatting annoyance.
This review was originally posted on Second Run Reviews