Down for the Count

Author Michael Washburn reviews Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s Count Luna from New Directions Press, 2020

The influence of Dracula on both popular and literary culture goes on and on. There are tons of awful movies out there, and many novels not worth mentioning, but every so often, a book comes along that’s a true wonder. It glimmers with a unique identity while leaving little doubt as to its thematic pedigree. One such work is the Austrian poet Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s short 1955 novel Count Luna, which New Directions has released in a fine translation by Jane B. Greene. Here is a novel that upends convention, telling the tale of a count from the bad guy’s point of view, but the villain is not the count.

Count Luna is the story of an aristocrat and shipping magnate named Jessiersky, whose callous actions during the Second World War lead to a party on the other side of a land dispute, the eponymous count, getting deported to a concentration camp. After the war, Jessiersky comes to believe that Count Luna not only survived, but is stalking him, making strange nocturnal visits to his mansion and plotting an act of vengeance befitting the terrible wrongs that Jessiersky did. A number of bizarre and surreal incidents take place in Jessiersky’s mansion. The author makes us feel acutely the protagonist’s bewilderment and frustration as he tries vainly to track down the source of the ominous steps he hears moving across stone floors.

An increasingly distraught Jessiersky begins to stalk the stalker. The pursuit of the man he believes to have it in for him comes to obsess Jessiersky, for whom Count Luna represents not just a man whose life he ruined, but the return of the repressed in the most threatening form imaginable. The count’s specter demands a reckoning with a past for which Jessiersky, like so many others who went on to enjoy a pleasant bourgeois existence in Germany (or, in some cases, the U.S. or Canada or South America), would rather not answer.

Count Luna may have vanished into the passages deep down under the streets of Rome, a possibility Jessiersky spares no effort to investigate, but the pursuit takes Jessiersky to many other locales. Jessiersky stops at nothing to try to find the object of his obsession.

When Jessiersky ventures out into an alpine countryside, to train his rifle from long distance on a member of a hunting party he believes, mistakenly, to be the count who’s after him, we get the following haunting description: “He had focused the binoculars first upon the ice fields, which at one moment were dazzlingly brilliant and the next a dull gray, then upon the misty stone ridges of the peaks, and finally upon the ancient fir trees farther off in the pasture. They were the last outposts of a forest that stretched from the foot of the pastureland down into a dark, ravine-like valley and its roaring stream…. Their roots coiled in and out of the ground around them like clusters of enormous snakes.”

In his own mind, Jessiersky is out to stop an agent of terror who may have violated the sanctity of his home. But his willingness to shoot from a great distance at a stranger whose identity he hasn’t even confirmed only drives home once again the blind callousness that brought his predicament about in the first place, when he brought about Count Luna’s deportation to a Nazi death camp. 

The passage quoted above offers a taste of the exquisite writing that fills this book. Readers must experience it. The prose is spare, yet endlessly expressive. The novel is about terrors specific to a time and place in history, but there’s something primeval about the setting. It’s both within and outside time. 

In this novel, Jessiersky’s fear of the Other grows palpable and somewhat overpowering not only because Count Luna has morality on his side—he’s suffered as a direct consequence of complicity in the worst evil Europe has known—but also because Count Luna, both in name and persona, has a fearsome pedigree. He’s the count, the shadowy figure, the sum of all your fears, the enigma you can’t begin to make sense of, let alone hide from, and he’s coming for you.

Imagine if you knew Dracula was after you, and had every reason to want to get you. You’d sleep even less than a Biden supporter afflicted with dreams of four more years of You Know Who.

Michael Washburn is a Brooklyn-based writer, journalist and the author, most recently, of When We're Grownups (2019) and Stranger, Stranger (2020). His short story "Confessions of a Spook" won Causeway Lit's 2018 fiction contest.