Charlotte Kersten

“People aren’t meant to live forever. I know that now.”

Year published: 2021

Categories: Adult, horror, retelling (Dracula)

LGBTQIA representation: F/F, M/M, and F/F/M, main character and her love interests

Summary: Saved from the brink of death by a mysterious stranger, Constanta is transformed from a medieval peasant into a bride fit for an undying king. But when Dracula draws a cunning aristocrat and a starving artist into his web of passion and deceit, Constanta realizes that her beloved is capable of terrible things. Finding comfort in the arms of her rival consorts, she begins to unravel their husband’s dark secrets.

With the lives of everyone she loves on the line, Constanta will have to choose between her own freedom and her love for her husband. But bonds forged by blood can only be broken by death.

My thoughts: The first word that comes to mind when I try to describe this book is “florid” – it’s lush and heavy and sexual and dark. There’s almost a bit of Angela Carter to it, with the fierce feminist reimagining of a classic story and the monstrousness, lingering dread, hunger and deeply erotic tinge.

There’s a whole genre out there that I’m very fond of that can basically be described as “What if the Real Monster Was Abuse?” and I think that a Dracula retelling is a great addition in principle, and that this Dracula retelling is a great addition in practice. Vampires are literal and oftentimes metaphorical predators, so it’s not that far a leap to the way Gibson shows him seducing his sirelings and making himself the center of their world, controlling them through his force of character and oh-so benevolent control and his conviction that he is their savior. He dictates their lives after death until they don’t feel worth living anymore, and I really enjoyed seeing Constanta start to unravel what was happening, ultimately finding her strength and fighting back in a deeply satisfying conclusion. I think this is also the first book I’ve read with a polyamorous relationship, and I really like that the three sirelings fight back for each others’ sakes and find hope and strength in each other.

I also think this book does a good job of depicting life as a vampire overall – the loneliness, the boredom, the way that civilizations rise and fall, wars pass, and cultures, technology and philosophy change. I do have a couple of quibbles with this however – Constanta, speaking in the present tense, says that she thinks people aren’t meant to live forever, but at the end of the book she decides that she is going to raise her own family of sirelings. This feels like a pretty big oversight. In addition (and this is a really, really peculiar and subjective one so YMMV) I was kind of dissatisfied with Gibson’s attempts to make Constanta sympathetic to a progressive reader, making it clear that she only kills men who are rapists and abusers of her own free will and explicitly disapproves of colonialism. Both plausible, I suppose, but somehow they feel a little…clumsy, I guess? in how clear it is that the author wants Constanta to be as morally clean as it is possible for a vampire to be, untarnished by the REALLY bad murder of people who aren’t morally repugnant themselves or those darn Problematic Opinions people had in the past. I’m not saying that I’d prefer for the opposite to be true in either case, but it just feels a little strange to emphasize those points when she is still a serial killer with an untold body count, and when her two (sympathetic) lovers are out murdering and hunting with zero abandon or compunction.

While the writing is generally very lovely, I did notice a few mistakes and tics – at one point, Constanta calls Dracula her “savoir,” which I am pretty sure was intended to be “savior.” There are also far too many mentions of bruised lips for a book of this length, and while Constanta is on the dancefloor, there are three similes comparing the crowd to birds, fish and sharks in just a couple of pages. Overall, though, this is a book after my own heart. I enjoyed it immensely and will be anticipating whatever Gibson writes next.