This book was a disappointment. It had an intriguing premise of some sort of curse (presumed to be vampiric) on the upper crust of Princeton, New Jersey in 1905-1906. And the bouncing around several different stories by a ditzy "historian" narrator promised to be a good way of presenting a horror story, in much the same way that the epistolary narrative in Dracula did.
But instead of presenting a coherent story, the book presented fragments of the horror story (albeit well-done fragments), loaded down with two completely unrelated stories - one of the academic struggles of Princeton university president Woodrow Wilson and another with the socialist advocacy of Upton Sinclair, who was living in Princeton at the time. I kept waiting for the stories to intertwine, but they never really did.