Review: The Dead Travel Fast by Deanna Raybourn

Theodora Lestrange, mourning the death of her grandfather and guardian, leaves Edinburgh for the wilds of Transylvania. It is the late 19th century and Theodora, at the old age of twenty-three, is veering dangerously close to spinsterhood. She leaves behind a homebody sister and brother-in-law (a vicar, of course!) who are anxious to see her married and an earnest but bland suitor, Charles, who is eager to step up to the plate. But Theodora eyes domesticity with great horror: she is a writer and wants to make her own way and her own name by penning a full-length novel.

Seeking inspiration (and escape), she journeys to Romania to visit her old school friend Cosmina, niece of the recently deceased Count Bogdan Dragulescu. The Dragulescu family castle is a gothic fantasy with crumbling walls, moldering tapestries, and a darkly alluring rising count, Andrei, whose betrothal to Cosmina has inspired not joy but dread. Predictably, Theodora finds herself increasingly drawn to the mysterious Andrei, and he to her, but their romance is not the only thread in Raybourn's masterfully woven story. A rash of eerie occurrences and the suspicious death of a young servant girl threaten to consume the sanity, if not the very lives, of the castle's inhabitants, leaving Theodora (and the reader) wondering if she was not too quick to dismiss the tales of vampires and werewolves that echo from the Carpathian peaks.

With a title culled from Dracula, a properly straining bodice on the cover, and a glowing endorsement from one of my favorite authors, this was a book I was eager to start. (It seemed an appropriately seasonal read.) I started it last night and I just could not put it down! The story itself is pretty straight-forward gothic: a drafty castle in the Carpathians, inhabited by a mysterious, handsome, brooding young count, his ailing mother, and his pretty cousin, is visited by the pretty cousin's pretty and precocious friend, whereupon mysterious and creepy things start happening. But it's complicated by a much more human and complex story of the weaving and unraveling of human relationships.

True, much of the book's horror revolves around the supernatural: vampires (the feared strigoi), werewolves, ghostly occurrences, and peasant superstitions. At the heart of these terrors, however, lies something more mundane. Theodora is right to note the folklorist's interpretation of these tales as myths used to explain the unknowable parts of our lives and ourselves. What is to be feared is not so much the unnatural monster that stalks the forests as the monsters in our own bodies and minds: envy, anger, madness, passion, and love. I was put in mind of a scene in the BBC adaptation of Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey in which Henry Tilney (swoon...) tells Catherine Morland that the "evil" in his family home is a kind of vampirism: "Perhaps it was stupid to express it so but we did watch him drain the life out of her with his coldness and his cruelty...No vampires, no blood. But worse crimes, crimes of the heart." Ultimately it is left to the reader of The Dead Travel Fast to decide whether the crimes perpetuated in the novel were committed by a vampire or by a human hand, or if, after all, the two are so very different.

Part gothic romance and part murder mystery, the book was enjoyable from start to finish. Raybourn's sense of atmosphere is terrific, her writing supremely evocative, and her characters varied and vivid. The rakish, glamorous, tortured Andrei is particularly wonderful. I think I've found a new author to binge on! Loved this!