bloodygranuaile

I picked up A. R. Vishny’s Night Owls at a very bookish wedding because I thought it sounded like fun, even though it’s YA and I’m not finding myself to really enjoy a lot of YA anymore. (I think I am too old and stuff written for today’s teens does not resonate with me.) But this one promised queer Jewish owl-vampires and a lot of old New York lore and some shenanigans with dead people, so I figured it could be fun.

And it was! I am not super familiar with Jewish folklore, so for me as a reader, the estries were a fairly novel take on vampires, a subject upon which I am otherwise very familiar (possibly too familiar). I also learned a lot about late nineteenth and early twentieth century Yiddish theater, a subject upon which I am again not familiar. I don’t think I am the primary target audience for this book, in that the author is Jewish and seems to want to write about Jewish things for other Jewish people, but I enjoyed it very much all the same–it’s YA, so it’s an easy enough read and willing to explain all but the most obvious stuff to its adolescent characters, and I’ve read enough hundreds of variously warmed-over Christian-derived monster books over the past three decades that it was really great to get something else.

The setup is as such: Clara and Molly appear to be in their late teens but are in fact each well over 100 years old because they are estries. They are the curators and inhabitants of an old Yiddish theater called the Grand Dame, which has been revived as an indie cinema. They rent this building from the prince of demons in exchange for pictures of faces, because how else are you going to get affordable rent in Manhattan when you look like a permanent 18-year-old.

The shenanigans really kick off when Anat, Molly’s current human girlfriend, gets possessed by the ghost of what might be Molly’s first human girlfriend, Lena, who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. Other strange things are happening, too. Initially unbeknownst to Molly and Clara, their hot mess of a box office assistant, Boaz, is also dealing with supernatural stuff, because his family is cursed to be able to talk to ghosts, and the ghosts are getting bolder and pushier. In order to save Anat, and save the world from the demon prince’s machinations, all our main characters will have to come clean about their supernatural secrets and start being able to trust each other for long enough to piece together what is actually going on–which is difficult both because they’re all long used to keeping this stuff secret, and because in true paranormal romance fashion, they are all full of inconvenient feelings. This all builds up to a beautifully chaotic climax involving the space between worlds–the world of the living and that of the dead–manifesting as all sorts of stage and movie sets and places from the characters’ pasts, as various ghosts and demons try to kidnap our characters, steal the family heirloom that Boaz’ Aunt Hila uses to do medium-ing, and generally overrun the world of the living.

Trying to thwart ancient demons isn’t particularly easy–they are clever and have had a lot of time to practice being shady–so the tension remains pleasantly high as characters are crossed and double-crossed, especially in the second half of the book where saving Anat/the world gets quite time-sensitive and poor anxious Boaz is getting hassled by strong-willed secondary characters left and right. Overall I found this book to just be really cute and fun–it’s a pretty quick read, and I got through it over the course of one snowstorm. There’s teenage angst and demons with bird feet and a bunch of wish-fulfillment-y nerd shit about old movies; what else do you need from a YA fantasy?

This year I did Dracula Daily but unsubscribed from the actual Dracula Daily substack, instead reading along in my ancient copy of The Essential Dracula, an annotated version of the book with notes and a bunch of front and end matter by Radu T. Florescu and Raymond McNally, who were apparently bigshot Dracula scholars in the ‘70s or thereabouts.

The book itself continues to be phenomenal even reading it the third year in a row. Every year I find myself getting excited about stuff I’d completely forgotten from the previous year. I’m excited to rediscover next year what I’ve already forgotten since May.

The annotated version is honestly hilarious. Some of the annotations are really cool and interesting, because they’re about what was in Bram Stoker’s notes, which these editors seem to have been the first published people to have access to. Others are sort of goofy reading comprehension tidbits, and some are just the editors’ personal opinions on stuff. The book comes with an “annotated filmography,” which provides an interesting tour of vampire movies (not just Dracula adaptations) up to somewhere around when the Interview with the Vampire movie was announced but was still expected to star John Travolta. It is also shamelessly full of the editors’ personal opinions, as is the bibliography, which is even funnier because the bibliography contains the editors’ own books (unsurprisingly, they think their own books are great). There is also an interestingly dated guide to doing “Dracula tours” of England and what was at the time of publication the Socialist Republic of Romania.

Anyway, I am very glad I read this even if it’s not necessarily something I’d recommend to someone who’s new to Dracula today. It’s a great historical piece from the history of people being obsessed with Dracula, and also you get to read Dracula again.

A friend sent me a copy of Dead Letter Society, an epistolary RPG about vampires. It involves writing letters back and forth and also using Tarot cards instead of dice to determine your plot events and bits of worldbuilding. I’ll have to wait until I actually play it to deliver a final verdict but it sounds like a lot of fun and certainly relevant to my interests. The gameplay revolves around a mysterious vampire society called the Dead Letter Society, which basically exists to facilitate vampire networking, so the first letter in the game is to the Society, who then matches the player vampires together toward whatever end they may have in common. It sounds like a lot of fun and I will have to set up a game soon!

A few Christmases ago I picked up a beautifully bound hardback copy of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla at the Strand, and then last year I subscribed to Carmilla Weekly rather than read it. This year, I decided reading the pretty book would be more fun!

Though it’s only been a year since my last reread, I once again forgot just how gay this book is. It is well-known that 19th century vampires stories–of which there are many, though for some reason every one that isn’t Dracula likes to present itself as the singular and only precursor to Dracula–are full of homoerotic subtext, and that knowledge exerts such a pull on my brain that every time I step away from Carmilla for like five seconds I apparently start thinking that it applies here, too. This is incorrect. It is not subtext. I swear to God one of these years I will remember that the homoeroticism in this one is just regular text.

At any rate, it’s such an excellent little creepy read! I swear it gets better every time I read it. Just a perfect little bite-size (heh) vampire story for October.

In my recent fit of subscribing to classic literature via newsletter, I also subscribed to Carmilla Weekly, which sent me one chapter a week of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s classic vampire novella Carmilla. These are again very short chapters, as there are 16 of them and the book is only novella-length (what with being a novella and all). Sixteen weeks is way more time than is needed to read a book this short, but whatever, it was fun to get a little dose of Carmilla in my inbox every weekend for four months.

The book continues to be a) an excellent work of horror, effectively building an atmosphere of isolated, mysterious creeping dread, and b) super gay. Highly recommend.

This spring, after some initial resistance, I jumped onto the Dracula Daily bandwagon, and as such have been reading Bram Stoker’s 1982 Gothic masterpiece Dracula in little bits and pieces, some out of order, more days than not for the past few months. Though I have read Dracula before, there was definitely something fun and different about reading it in real-time, playing with the epistolary form by waiting for emails from my dear friends about what they’d been up to, and being in a fandom/giant book club with the most insane minds on the Internet via the Dracula Daily tag on Tumblr. These past six months have been so much fun, and have really forced me to slow down and notice so many delicious and weird little things about the book that usually get lost when I just mainline the whole novel by myself in a few days with no one to discuss it with. It was, of course, also lovely watching so many new readers discover all the ways in which the novel differs from the many pop culture variations on it, and get outraged together over the ways in which movies and such have consistently done Lucy and Jonathan dirty, made Dracula and Van Helsing inexplicably sexy instead of the goofy old men they are, and, most unforgivably, always cut our “laconic,” Winchester-wielding Texas gentleman Quincey Morris.

One of the things that I think was great about this slow, discussion-filled read-through was that it ended up really highlighting not just overlook triumph of craft like the dry humor and the slow mounting terror of Jonathan and Lucy’s plotlines, but it also gave us enough room to simultaneously explore just how very much this story is rooted in being about a bunch of English people in the 1890s, and the ways in which they still are very relatable and relevant to situations and people we know today–Jonathan the young lawyer on his first real business trip, steadfastly ignoring how weird everything is because he can’t afford to be rude or fuck up; Seward the overpromoted young whiz kid making a podcast (with voices) and clinging to his emotional support lancet because he is actually a huge dork; hypercompetent Mina dealing with the guilt and terror by throwing herself into admin/secretarial tasks that keep everyone organized. Every member of Anti-Vampire Aktion is a nerdy jewel of classic literature and it would be nice if someday, someone adapted them all for screen without wholesale replacing them with completely unrecognizable simulacra.

But also: the chicken paprika recipe! Dracula’s unseasonable straw hat! The disrespectful zookeeper! Seeing from Jonathan’s violent demeanor that he was English! VAN HELSING’S CORN METAPHORS. I had forgotten how fucking funny this book is! It’s nice to read with a population that is primed to zero in on everything that could be joked about and ensure it is joked about good and hard. 10/10 would take a lit class with Tumblr University again.

In my search for weird spooky season reads I figured it was time to finally pick up the rest of Montague Summers’ The Vampire (originally published as The Vampire: His Kith and Kin), the first two chapters of which I read sometime when I was still in school, and which I have been moving around from house to house with a bookmark in Chapter 3 for a good 15 years now.

Montague Summers is not an easy read. He was an incredibly strange person, initially studying to be an Anglican priest and then converting to Roman Catholicism and styling himself a Catholic priest despite there being no records of him having ever been ordained. He believed wholeheartedly in witches, vampires, werewolves, demons, and all sorts of things that the Catholic Church had since come to see as embarrassing superstitions. He was writing in the early 20th century and dressing like it was the late Middle Ages. He is the absolute wordiest man in the world, and his writing is full of long rambling digressions, vehemently earnest editorializing, untranslated passages in Latin and French, half-translated passages in Greek and German, and quotations from every conceivable source, no matter how dubious–from Ovid to newspaper articles to “an authority” to some guy he once met. His works are likely best read on a hefty dose of NyQuil.

That said, the book furnishes us with a fascinating array of legends, ghost stories, and murders, as well as whatever other anecdotes Summers feels like telling on any subject whatsoever. To the degree that they are tied together by anything, they are being sorted into Summers’ attempts to “prove” what beliefs about vampires are true and which ones are embellishments. He is entertainingly disdainful of people who do not believe in them at all, and extremely judgmental in his tours through the folklore of the world. I don’t remember very much about the first two chapters, since I read them umpteen years ago. The third chapter, “The Traits and Practices of Vampirism,” talks a lot about suicides and Greek drama, then relates many interesting folkloric beliefs about types of blood-eating ghosts and demons from various places and what causes someone to become one of these ghosts, then embarks upon a supremely awkward analysis of “love-bites” before relating to the reader the career of serial killer Fritz Haarmaan, who would have been reasonably recent news at the time of publication (Haarmaan was exposed in late 1924). The fourth chapter concerns vampire legends in “Assyria, the East, and some Ancient Countries,” which is very A Nineteenth-Century British Guy Writes About Asia at times, but is great fun if you can remember not to take any of it seriously (which is easy, given that Summers is largely relating these legends with an eye towards somehow proving that vampires are real, and therefore takes great pains to point out commonalities with European vampire legends and explain away differences).

The last chapter is undoubtedly the funniest and the most obviously dated. It is called “The Vampire in Literature” and it is like 75% about French theater. It references many interesting-sounding works that have apparently not stood the test of time at all as I have never heard of them, and I have heard of a lot of old vampire literature. He discusses Polidori’s The Vampyre at little length and then the bajillion stage adaptations thereof at much greater length. He professes that good scary stories have to be short, which is hilarious coming from the Reverend Augustus Montague Summers, Wordiest Motherfucker in the World, of all people. He opines that even Le Fanu’s Carmilla is possibly starting to get overextended in how long it is (it is a novella); he then immediately contradicts himself by gushing over what an impressively long-running artistic work the 800-page monstrosity Varney the Vampire is. (He also misattributes it to Thomas Peckett Prest, which is one of his more understandable errors–this was a popular belief at the time.) His gushing praise for Varney contrasts hilariously with his disdain for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the unprecedented popularity of which he attributes solely to the fact that it’s about vampires, as he thinks that it is too long, the characters are boring, only the first five chapters have any real narrative tension, and–predictably but hilariously–that Bram Stoker erred in including aspects of the vampire legend that are poorly sourced and that Summers has therefore concluded are unfounded, and he thinks that Stoker should have stuck only to true and proven vampire facts. It is extra funny reading this in the context of doing the Dracula Daily readalong on Tumblr, where everyone is discovering anew after decades of unfaithful movie adaptations that “the polycula,” as it has been affectionately nicknamed, consists of absolutely fantastic characters that movie makers have done dirty for years. Of course, the only Dracula movie adaptation that even existed at the time this book was published was the unauthorized German expressionist film Nosferatu, and anyway, Summers does not acknowledge that movies exist. He instead closes out the book by slamming the Dracula stage adaptations and misspelling Bela Lugosi’s name.

In short, this book is almost unreadably terrible in an uncountable number of ways and yet I am tempted to be like “Absolutely perfect, 10/10, no notes,” because if it were in any way better it would be less funny. Highly recommended if you want to get real serious about insane pseudo-scholarly works on the occult by eccentric throwback Catholics who fancied themselves real-life vampire hunters.

Lord knows how many years ago I acquired two books, titled simply Witches and Werewolves, that were about exactly what they sound like and were part of the same little series of slim black hardbacks that also contained a third book, Vampires. Though the third of these was obviously the most relevant to my interests, it nonetheless sat on my Amazon wish list for several years without my actually buying it. This is largely because, while the books are incredibly cute and fun and look great sitting on my occult shelf, they are not particularly good.

Well, having recently moved into my tiny little witch cottage here in Spookytown, I decided it was well past time to shell out the five dollars or whatever to fill out the series so that it would look nice and complete on my now-much-fancier occult shelf.

Much like Witches and Werewolves, Nigel Suckling’s Vampires is fun and cute but not particularly good. It contains a scattershot bunch of Vampire Facts divvied up roughly into old myths/folklore, historical figures around whom vampire legends have grown, and literary vampires. By this point in my life, I already know most of the stories and persons referenced in here, often in greater depth from some other, less shoddy publication (the exception here is Countess Bathory; I’ve never read a real book on her). However, it’s still quite an enjoyable little read, with black-and-white illustrations and lots of nice red accents on the page (the paragraphs are separated by tiny little red bat icons. Darling!). I can’t get mad about the shallowness of the research since I don’t think the book is meant to be taken too seriously in the first place; the verso across from the title page contains the epigraph “Any book without a mistake in it has had too much money spent on it” (from the publisher Sir William Collins, founder of what would eventually become HarperCollins).

Probably the most useful thing about the book, as with so many other gifty little primer type books, is the recommendation list of movies and books. I’ve read almost all of the classic literary books mentioned but I still have some to catch up on in terms of vampire scholarship (I will read In Search of Dracula one day, I swear…), and I’ve seen fewer of the movies than I realized. Maybe I’ll fix that this spooky season.

On the recommendation of multiple people I checked out S.T. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood, a novel about the brides of Dracula from the point of view of the oldest of the three brides, Constanta.

Dracula is, unsurprisingly, a highly controlling husband; the brides have curfews and shit and are kept ignorant of fairly important basic life things like the polycule’s finances. When Magdalena and Alexi are added to the family, he’s the one who finds them and picks them and presents them to Constanta; her buy-in is obtained, but it’s clear that each addition was a done deal before she even meets them. As their sire, he gets to decide how much about their new form of life he’s going to tell them; it is not very much. He forbids them from having human friends and, over time, discourages hobbies that involve interacting with other people. When they get depressed, he rages at them that they don’t have any right to be miserable because of all that he’s given them. It is unambiguously the kind of stuff that terms like “emotionally and psychologically abusive” were in fact coined to describe (curfews!! for your spouses!!) but I’m still on my kick that that those words need to go up on the high shelf where the internet can’t reach them and we’d all be better off using literally any other terminology for a while, so I’m just going to say: this Dracula is unambiguously cruel and tyrannical and if you want to find out how specifically, you can read the book, but it involves shit like “forcibly moving people out into the middle of nowhere and locking them inside the house because he’s jealous that they can make friends too easily in the city.” Also, murder!

The format is interesting; it’s written as a confessional from Constanta to the unnamed Dracula after he’s dead (properly deaded, not undead) so it’s one of those written-in-the-second-person type deals. It’s got all the necessary indulgences of vampire fantasy, with lots of hanging out in Paris going to the opera and witnessing important historical events and that sort of thing. Our dysfunctional polycule of horny bi vampires may all be emotional wrecks but they are certainly seduced into it with a lot of luxuries (which are then slowly taken away from them).

Anyway, it is all very gothic, and you sort of know where it’s going the whole time but it is nonetheless very satisfying when you get there.

For 2021 I decided to do another yearlong read, the way I did with A People’s History of the United States in 2019, but because we were going into Plague Year #2 I decided that instead of reading any kind of edifying leftist theory or history I was instead going to dedicate myself to the legendary bloated Gothic monstrosity that has been sitting on my shelf for so many years: James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney, the Vampire: Or, The Feast of Blood. My copy clocks in at about 800 pages, but they are not 800 normal novel pages; they are 800 telephone-book-sized pages full of 8-point font.

I decided to read this in 12 76-page chunks over the course of the year not just because it is monstrously long, but also because I knew going into it that it was monstrously bad. Varney is a masterpiece of mid-19th-century penny dreadful serial fiction, meaning that by most conventional measures of good literature, it is not a masterpiece at all. It was published one chapter at a time on a weekly basis for nearly two years, so even reading stretched out over the course of one still means I am experiencing it in a much more contracted time frame than its original readers, and frankly even reading 70 pages at a time felt kind of like binge-watching one of those old-fashioned episodic sitcoms that wasn’t really meant to be watched sequentially. These things went to print with no editing, no consistency checks, and nearly no planning; the title character has at least four distinct vampire origin stories that all take place in different time periods and operate according to different and mutually exclusive mythologies. The style is stilted and overwritten and contains many scenes full of the kind of hemming and hawing that I recognize in first drafts as “starting to write the scene before you’ve figured out what the people in it need to be doing” writing, like “three pages of people getting settled into their chairs going ‘yes, sit down, I’ve got to talk to you about a thing, can I get you some tea’ before talking about the thing” scenes that usually get cut somewhere around draft two, for works where you have a draft two. Plotlines are picked up and abandoned with the carelessness of the Lisa’s mother’s breast cancer subplot in The Room. Actually there are quite a lot of things in the book that have me wanting to draw comparisons to The Room, if that gives you an idea of how hilariously bad this book is.

The plot (ish) that takes up most of the book, like 70% of it or so, is the Bannerworth saga, which the 1970’s TV show Dark Shadows was largely based off of (if you’ve never seen Dark Shadows… well, it’s not actually very good either!). The Bannerworths are a very typical mid-19th century protagonist sort of family, being genteelly impoverished, a thoroughly boring middle-class family that can barely stay ahead of the debts of a scapegrace ancestor and has been reduced to letting all their servants go and even thinking about letting out their ancestral home and renting a smaller one (this is the second lowest level of Reduced Circumstances a character in 19th-century fiction can be reduced to; the level immediately below it is “freezing to death in the street”). The Bannerworth family, having lost its patriarch some years ago, now consists of a well-meaning mother (basically the only nice mother figure in the story; I suspect Rymer of mommy issues), two impeccably chivalrous young adult brothers, and an impeccably sweet and beautiful young adult/late teenage daughter named Flora. In their immediate circle are also some friends of the family, including Flora’s also impeccably chivalrous and very boring fiance, Charles Holland, and, for comic relief, the fiance’s uncle, who is a decorated Admiral in the British Navy, and Admiral Bell’s first mate and now personal valet, Jack Pringle. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle seem to exist solely to allow Rymer to mash up bits and pieces of nautical swashbuckler into his otherwise mainly land-locked vampire tale.

No, that is not true. Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle also serve the valuable function of breaking up Varney’s marriage plot schemes at the last minute, not once, but at least three times, each time with less leadup, until at the last one of these Admiral Bell just happens to be in the Church audience on the day of the wedding ceremony to recognize Varney and cause general consternation for absolutely no previously given reason at all. Honestly, even the second-to-last marriage plot had him visiting a family friend of the bridge a few pages in advance.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Varney, our fascinating villain and sometimes almost antihero, wants, over the course of the book, basically three things: the blood of young and beautiful maidens, money, and to be relieved of his cursed existence. Much of the book involves Varney pursuing plots to obtain one or, more often, both of the first two, via scheming to marry various wealthy young heiresses, or sometimes middle-class young heiresses. While the book opens with him attacking Flora Bannerworth and then embarking on a long and complicated strategy to obtain possession of Bannerworth Hall, he is eventually forced on to pursue the same tricks in a variety of inns and towns and cities around England. Later in the book he jaunts off to Italy to do just about the same thing, because you can’t really have an English Gothic novel in the 19th century without some exotic ties to Italy, or at least some racism against Italians. Eventually he returns back to England to be very melancholy and get into more scrapes involving eating lovely young maidens, escaping from mobs, incentivizing various persons to spend time in abandoned abbeys and cemeteries where they can catch terrible frights and witness things man was not meant to witness, all that lovely Gothic stuff. It all gets a bit repetitive, especially in the middle, although by the end we start getting some higher-stakes stuff, like more graphic on-page murders, and in one of the final plotlines Varney even creates a new vampire from one of the dully angelic teenage girls he attacks.

I think it is notable that while Varney is quite happy to murder people all up and down the countryside (in multiple countries) he only ever feeds by sneaking into ladies’ bedchambers and biting them while they are asleep, which certainly would be a very specific type of terrifying to Victorian readers. In several of these cases Varney is then called upon to guard the very same lady’s bedchamber for the following night, which usually goes awry quite spectacularly.

The edition of this book that I have is the “critical edition” which means it has a lot of footnotes and also some appendices. Some of the footnotes are quite interesting but others contain a lot of editorializing, including several footnotes to the tune of just “this writing is terrible.” Most of these callouts are fair but I must object strenuously to footnote 11, which is attached to the line “I am lost in a sea of wild conjecture.” I think this line is amazing and I plan to use it every time I don’t know what’s going on for the rest of my life (which is sure to be frequently, as I often don’t know what’s going on). The appendices are great, including a whole bunch of pearl-clutching editorials about the pernicious effects of penny dreadfuls on young minds, plus one wearily condescending defense of them by G.K. Chesterton, which essentially boils down to reminding everyone that there have always been stories that weren’t very good, we used to just ignore them instead of pretending they were supposed to be something they weren’t. There are also a couple other penny dreadfuls/penny bloods and excerpts therefrom, in case you hadn’t yet had your fill of murder and mayhem. But by far my favorite feature of the “critical edition” is the section breaks composed of three poorly sketched skulls. They are extremely cute and whimsical.

I really cannot in fairness recommend this book to other people unless you are really interested in terrible Gothic novels and, specifically, in the things that make terrible lowbrow fiction terrible. For good measure you’d probably have to be interested in both Gothic literature and in crappy horror movies, the kinds that I’m not even sure how to find anymore now that there aren’t video rental stores to find weird stupid shit in the back shelves of. However, if this sounds like you, and you are sure you have the time to put in to fight your way through this enormous, overwritten tome, it is certainly worth the slog, if only for Admiral Bell and Jack Pringle’s ridiculous exploits.

While I generally consider my fanfiction days to be behind me, I cannot avoid periodically dipping my toes into the world of reimagined 19th century Gothic classics, although as I get older and crankier I am finding myself with less and less patience for the ones that I think are done poorly or betray a shallow understanding of their source material. That does still leave me plenty to work with, though, whether it’s sensationalistic TV mashups like Penny Dreadful (minus the last two episodes of Season 2, which we will pretend never happened) or experimental niche content like that Carmilla webseries I totally intend to watch one of these days. So when I saw Silvia Moreno-Garcia posting on Twitter about publishing an English translation of a cult Mexican queer horror novella about the voyage of the Demeter, The Route of Ice and Salt, I had one moment of “Am I really going to pay twenty whole US dollars for gay Dracula fanfiction?” and then promptly answered myself “Yes.”

The Route of Ice and Salt is a strange little book, largely about dreams and in a self-consciously literary style that is probably going to read as a bit pretentious if you’re not in the mood for it, especially in the beginning when it’s not clear what’s actually going on yet other than that the captain is extremely horny and also having weird dreams about ship’s rats and the two are uncomfortably closely related. After the first third or so of the book, things take a little bit more of a discernable shape than “Gothic means mucking about with a bunch of taboo stuff” as the horrors of the Demeter’s voyage unfold outside the captain’s imagination as well as within it. The men go mad in various ways and disappear as the ship fills with fog, and white rats that fight the usual gray ship’s rats, and assorted types of bad weather, and other things that variously distract from or exacerbate the captain’s generally tortured emotional state. Ultimately, the captain has to deal with the demons from his past--here the trauma of his first lover, Mikhail, being killed by a mob and his corpse subjected to the sort of degradations that Eastern European folk beliefs demanded to make “safe” the burials of “unnatural” people--in order to deal with the demon in his present, i.e., the vampire in the cargo hold, and thus sailing us into his brief cameo in the pages of Dracula, lashed to the wheel of an empty ship, with only his ship’s log to tell what happened.

Overall: Very creepy, very horny, to the point where there’s an afterword by Poppy Z. Brite even though he retired from horror like 20 years ago. I have only read one Poppy Z. Brite book but I feel like you either understand what I mean by “Poppy Z. Brite levels of creepy + horny + gay” or you don’t, but anyway, this book is that.

Also, the actual book itself is lovely, with big fancy chapter headings and the obligatory “this is a book about ships” sort of fonts, and claustrophobically wide margins.

To kick off my vow not to read any more goddamn politics books until after Readercon, I picked up a copy of Theodora Goss' European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman from the library. It's the sequel to The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter, which I read when it was first published and loved. I had somehow completely missed it when the sequel was published, but having recently had it brought to my attention, it was difficult to forget about again.

Given how much I like this series, it might seem odd that my main complaint about European Travel is that there is too much of it. But there is: at over 700 pages, it has 300 pages over its predecessor; in addition, I don't think it really needed to be 700 pages. Given that the style doesn't do much at all to mimic 19th-century overwriting, it just reads like a modern novel that needed another round of cuts. Especially given that part of the novel's structure deliberately includes the action being constantly interrupted with asides, once I started feeling that it was dragging, it was all too easy for Copy Editor Brain to turn on and for me to start looking for places I would have cut words if I were doing a pass on the manuscript. I think most of the asides could have been about half as many words; they tended to stray one step too far away to keep up a witty tension and just became rambly, and lampshading the problem--as the characters frequently do--only adds to it, it doesn't fix it. At one point about halfway through the book, one character asks a question and the other character "shrugged as if to indicate that she had no idea," and I got so irrationally angry that I had to put the book down a for a minute, like I know what shrugging means, dammit! At least it didn't say she shrugged her shoulders. I'm generally OK with leisurely pacing, but the words in sentences should add some sort of meaning to them.

Other than the hundred pages worth of tightening it needed, I did thoroughly enjoy this book. It's basically Gothic classics fanfiction, and I loooove Gothic classics fanfiction, especially in the YA girls' adventure mould. This book brings in a lot more Dracula-related stuff, as was teased at the end of Alchemist's Daughter, and it does not disappoint. We don't just meet Mina Murray, Count Dracula, and Lucinda van Helsing, but we also meet Carmilla and her girlfriend, get some gossip about Lord Ruthven, go on spy adventures with Irene Adler (now Irene Norton), and get psychoanalyzed by one Dr. Sigmund Freud in Vienna.

The plot can most accurately be described as a series of hijinks and shenanigans, hitting many classic plot devices, like getting kidnapped and having to wear lots of disguises, and also some slightly more unusual ones, like successfully breaking into and then back out of a mental asylum, a period-appropriate twist on your classic jailbreak. There is a good deal of food porn, and now I'm craving chicken paprikash even though it's not really the season for it. It does all pull together into a unifying plot with serious ethical themes about the limits of science and the ethics of human experimentation, but mostly it's a jolly good ride fighting mad vampires and trying to get a bunch of snotty old Victorian scientist dudes to stop screwing up. I have every intention of reading the third book in what has now been officially announced as a trilogy, which will apparently have to do with mesmerism.

Current Mood: busy

Since it is Labor Day weekend, I felt very strongly that I did not want to do anything that could be considered productive if I did not have to; in addition, I was in need of a palate cleanser after reading the educational and distressing Evicted. In other words, it was Cheesy Vampire Novel O'Clock.

I decided upon Deborah Harkness' The Book of Life, the third book in her witch/vampire romance All Souls trilogy, a set of doorstoppers stuffed with witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, time travel, srs bsns historical research, fake genetics, wealth porn, gratuitous Frenchness, the obligatory impossible vampire pregnancy plotline, elite academia, sexy libraries, and lots of wine (some vampires never drink... vine. These are not those vampires). In short, it's like Outlander for vampire nerds (and less racist, not like that's the world's highest bar to clear).

My biggest issue with this book is entirely my own fault, which is that it's been like six years since I read Shadow of Night and I forgot a lot of what happened? I remembered they went back in time to 1591 and Diana got pregnant and met Matthew's several-decades-dead terrifying vampire patriarch, Philippe. And that there was a Scottish vampire who had been a gallowglass and now his name was Gallowglass, just in case you were afraid we were going to leave out the sexy Scotsman from this time-traveling vampire romance. But this is a very big complex story with many threads and many, many characters across timelines, and vampire families are huge hierarchical monstrosities of tangled pack dynamics and generational sprawl, and so I was very lost for quite a lot of it. That's what I get for acquiring too many books and not finishing series in a timely manner, I suppose.

Like many vampire books, huge chunks of this series are basically just wish fulfillment for nerdy ladies. While some of the wish fulfullment aspects do not reflect any of my wishes and therefore fall a bit flat ("He's authoritarian and broody but he's also terribly tall" is basically Why I Do Not Read Romance Novels, also, I honestly consider "interested in genetics" to be a huge red flag, although perhaps it is less red flaggy for actual genetics researchers), other aspects of it go right to my lizard brain, like "has magical powers" and "gets to live in multiple fancy homes from multiple interesting historical time periods," not to mention "elite access to extremely fancy libraries" and "can actually memorize mystical shit beyond half the Tarot deck" (I have been reading Tarot for 15 years and only have half the deck memorized; this is how much I don't rely on my own brain for things). Diana also apparently goes months without checking her email, which annoys all the other characters but honestly sounds fucking glorious.

The book also features interstitial excerpts from Diana's commonplace book from the 16th century in which she takes notes on the signs of the Zodiac, and if you think I'm not going to copy them into my own little baby Book of Shadows later this morning, you have underestimated how much I am witchy pop culture trash.

For BSpec's book club I finally got around to reading the first book in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence, which I have been meaning to do for at least two years now. I have the last two books in the sequence signed, but the first one only in paperback, and am missing the second and third. To make it even more complicated, the books take place in a different order than they are published -- they are ordered by the number referenced in the title.

The first book, therefore, is Three Parts Dead, which follows the adventures of young Craftswoman Tara Abernathy as she is hired on probation at the necromantic law firm of Kelethres, Albrecht, and Ao under the mentorship of terrifyingly efficient senior Craftwoman Elayne Kevarian. Tara graduated from Craft school under dubious circumstances that involved her trying to kill one of her professors and getting thrown out of the school, literally, which is pretty dangerous because the school floats up in the sky, as all the best magic schools do.

Tara's first assignment is in the city of Alt Coulomb, which runs off the power of its god, Kos Everburning. Unfortunately, Kos has died under mysterious circumstances. Tara, with the help of a hilarious sheltered young priest (or Novice Technician, as he is called) named Abelard and his junkie policewoman friend Cat, has to help Elayne figure out who killed Kos and why and how and who benefits and all that stuff and generally unravel the massive conspiracy hidden in the heart of the Church.

While the story is plenty funny, it's not as much of a comedy as one might think from some of its elements -- demon lawyers! a vampire pirate captain! divine contract law! -- and the world of magical techno-corporatocracy that Gladstone builds is convincing, at once both weird and distressingly familiar.

Tara is a great protagonist, driven and talented and badass and definitely in a bit over her head, and Abelard is a great dual lead, being an earnest bumbling weirdo in an arcane religious order who chain-smokes to show religious devotion and doesn't know what a newspaper is. They're a fantastic, fantastic team, especially since the book very sensibly eschews the unnecessary romantic subplot that I think a lot of authors would have found obligatory. Instead of romance we get, like, shape-shifting gargoyles and blood magic libraries and a nine-story demonic BDSM nightclub and stuff like that.

The philosophical underpinnings of the main conflict ends up having a lot to do with free will and consent and the dangers of clever, talented technolibertarian douchebags being allowed to exploit other people without adult supervision, so suffice it to say that the book is not all fluff and explosions, although like any good urban fantasy it certainly has quite a lot in the way of fluff and explosions, and even an instance of leather pants.

I think we're going to get a really good discussion out of it. I've already started reading the next book in the Sequence, so we'll see how many we get through by the time book club rolls around.

So I was vaguely intending on only reading nonfiction from now through March but then I discovered the Bloodsucking Feminists podcast and realized I'd never read John Polidori's The Vampyre: A Tale, so of course then I went and read The Vampyre. After listening to the episode about it, because that's how I roll. (That is not how I prefer to roll but sometimes I mess up.)

The Vampyre is best known for being one of the entries in the famous horror story contest between Polidori, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. It... didn't win. Frankenstein won, in the process basically inventing science fiction generally and the cyborg story in particular. The Vampyre is also a pretty genre-kicking-off piece of work, being one of the earliest or possibly the earliest instances of vampire prose fiction in the English language, but if you read it you will understand why Frankenstein is generally considered the winner, even with Percy Shelley's terrible copy edits.

That said, it was a pretty valuable read, I think. It's short, so despite its flaws and the extremely eighteenth-century nature of those flaws, it's not too much of a slog (unlike, say, the thousand-plus-page Varney the Vampire, which I have been avoiding reading for at least two years now).

The story itself is fairly simple. A good-natured but flighty young dandy named Aubrey is introduced into society and befriends the aristocratic Lord Ruthven, who is a cold brooding sort but very handsome, and who only hangs out with the most virtuous of women. Aubrey and Ruthven go on a trip through Europe, which was a tradition for well-born young men at the time, and during the trip Aubrey notices that the virtuous young women Aubrey hangs out with all have their reputations ruined by the time they skip town. Ruthven also gambles a lot, and while Ruthven doesn't necessarily always win, the people he's playing with all manage to lose, and to exhibit horrendous bankroll management while they're at it. Aubrey eventually grows disgusted with the trail of fallen women and busto family men with hungry children that his friend is leaving in their wake, and bounces to Greece by himself, where he develops a flirtation with an "unspoilt" (this is a term with a large number of very specific meanings when applied to young maidens in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Brit lit) young Greek maiden, who tries to warn him about vampires. But he thinks she is just being adorably quaint and superstitious, so he goes to look at some ancient ruins or something and has to walk back home through the woods in the dark, where he finds a fancy knife and also the dead body of his Greek girlfriend, who has clearly died of being bitten in the neck. Ruthven shows back up and they keep traveling together, then Ruthven is shot by bandits and dies, but first he makes Aubrey promise not to tell anyone anything about what a terrible person he is for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, and the dead Ruthven's body mysteriously disappears.

Aubrey goes back to England where it's time for him to bring his sister out into society. At one of these society parties he espies Lord Ruthven, apparently no longer dead, and he can't say anything because he is a Man Of His Word and also he is apparently hallucinating Ruthven in his head saying "Don't you dare," which oddly is a thing that happens in the second Twilight book nearly two hundred years later. Aubrey runs away and has a fit, and spends the next several months descending further into the depths of fever, incoherence, and unspecified trauma-induced mental illness. As he gets closer to the deadline where he can finally tell people how terrible Ruthven is, he starts to feel better, and someone tells him that his sister is going to marry the Earl of Marsden, and he's happy for like ten seconds until he finds out that the Earl of Marsden is, of course, Lord Ruthven. Instead of being able to say anything, he has a stroke and his sister marries Ruthven and is promptly et, THE END. Seriously, that's the story. The vampire wins.

The storyline is entertaining enough, I suppose, but the real joy of The Vampyre lies in its epically poor pacing, wobbling unevenly through long atmospheric scenes with actual details and quotations and stuff, and passages that read more like the author's outline or synopsis for a scene rather than a scene itself. And it tends to be all the most important, exciting bits of the story that are rushed through like this, with vague, telling-not-showing sorts of descriptions that add two centuries' worth of dust on top of what are apparently some pretty action-packed chase scenes and intense histrionics. It has an amusingly Plan Nine from Outer Space-y feel to it, sometimes, with a palpable amateur earnestness that renders the clumsy wordcraft endearing.

This story, obviously, is of enormous historical importance to the development of the vampire story generally and the rise of the Byronic anti-hero character archetype in particular, and it also provides a good amount of fodder for discussion of at least two of the four pillars of British Romanticism Fuckery that my British Romanticism class focused on (race, class, gender, and imperialism--in this case, mostly gender and class, although you could have a good time deconstructing the portrayal of the Greeks a bit). For a much more thorough look into the weird gender politics of the story in particular, I strongly recommend checking out the relevant episode of Bloodsucking Feminists.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: podcasts

A few weeks ago I had the delightful experience of seeing Gail Carriger at a tea party/book signing at the Brookline Public Library, where I picked up the newest installment of her delightfully madcap steampunk Finishing School series, Waistcoats & Weaponry.

In this one, Sophronia Temminick and a number of her companions plot to escort Sidheag Maccon, Lady Kingair home to her werewolf pack in Scotland, after The Thing happens with Lord Maccon that we had learned about in Alexia’s series, where he goes off to become Alpha of Woolsey. Before this, of course, there is a masquerade ball where, among other ridiculous things, all the household mechanicals go nuts and begin to sing “Rule, Britannia!” and Sophronia gets accidentally secretly engaged to Dimity’s younger brother Pillover.

Over the course of the action-packed adventure to Scotland, in which Sophronia, Sidheag, Dimity, fashionable twit Felix Mersey, and sootie Soap steal a train full of crystalline valve frequensors and their old enemy, vampire drone Monique. They run into diverse problems they must overcome, including low fuel, flywaymen, Dimity’s lamentable lack of cross-dressing savoir-faire, and Felix’s father. In between climbing things, hitting people, and practicing her espionage, Sophronia also has to deal with a lot of tangly difficult mental and emotional issues, such as the obligatory love triangle she’s got herself stuck in with Soap and Felix; whether she wishes to accept Lord Akeldama’s patronage when she finishes; and trying to figure out what the vampires, the Picklemen, the mechanicals, and other interested parties are up to.

My biggest issue with this book is the sad lack of Genevieve Lefoux. No book should fail to have at least a cursory Vieve cameo in it. There had better be some Vieve in Manners & Mutiny.

Carriger seems to get a bit deeper into the numerous shitty social issues of Victorian society with each books, and the results are often kind of awkward, although I think they’re supposed to be awkward. But the fact remains that the stuff that affects the protagonists directly (mostly sexism, although in Alexia’s case there’s also anti-Italian prejudice) is less awkward to read than the stuff that affects other characters and it’s the protagonists who put their foot in it, which happens with some frequency, as the protagonists for both series are straight white gentry ladies. Sophronia’s handling of her obligatory love triangle between Felix and Soap is particularly uncomfortable, because Soap is obviously ten billion times more awesome than Felix, partly because he is a pretty cool dude and partly just because he isn’t Felix.

As usual, the best part about this book is really neither the plot nor the social commentary, but the delightfully absurd language. The worldbuilding is so whimsical it makes Harry Potter look like gritty contemporary realism, and everything has beautifully ridiculous names, both of which reach their epitome in Sophronia’s illegal pet mechanical mini dachshund, Bumbersnoot, who eats coal and occasionally is forced to go undercover as a lacy reticule. Everyone goes around saying things like “I don’t know who you are, but I respect the courage of any man who goes around wearing satin breeches that tight” which I don’t think is an actual thing you were supposed to say in polite Victorian society but who cares. It’s basically complete fluff, but it’s complete fluff with steel-bladed fans and teen girls kicking the asses of pompous adults, which is definitely my favorite kind.

I can’t wait for the fourth one already, especially since I am still very concerned about Professor Braithwope’s mental health.

It’s October, and October means it’s time for me to read at least one classic vampire novel. I bought Varney the Vampire last year, but it’s intimidatingly ginormous and I don’t have enough spare time right now, plus I don’t want to lug the stupid thing around on the T. So instead I read J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 novella Carmilla, since it is short and I had it on Kindle.

The main thing I knew about Carmilla is that it involves lesbian vampires, or at least as lesbian a vampire as you could get away with publishing in the 1870s. Which actually turned out to be pretty blatantly lesbian, unless of course you are our terribly sheltered and Victorian narratrix, who has never head of lesbians and wonders if maybe Carmilla is actually a dude in disguise like in some of the old romances she’s read, but then decides she’s not manly enough to be a dude in disguise, and is just TERRIBLY BAFFLED.

In many ways, Carmilla follows the form of the traditional Victorian vampire Gothic, taking place in a secluded old schloss somewhere in Eastern Europe. The main character is Laura, the daughter of a British expat, who lives in the aforementioned giant crumbling castle with her aforementioned father, her old nursemaid, her less-old governess, and a handful of servants who are essentially invisible. Their nearest neighbor is an old German expat who lives in the next schloss twenty miles away.

The story begins when the German neighbor’s niece, who was supposed to come visit so that Laura could have a friend her own age, has to cancel her visit because she is unexpectedly dead. However, a carriage accident on the road brings Laura another visitor instead, a sickly but beautiful young woman named Carmilla. Carmilla’s ailment is ill-defined and mysterious but appears to be some sort of chronic fatigue thing, as Carmilla sleeps for much of the day and is locked in her room all night. In traditional folklore-vampire fashion, peasants start dying, one every couple of weeks, and Laura begins having weird dreams and developing a languor similar to Carmilla’s. Much of the book is dedicated to the odd friendship that grows between Carmilla and Laura, in which Laura is mostly delighted to have a friend her own age and partially irritated with Carmilla’s refusal to talk about her life and some of her weird behavior, including her bouts of rapturous affection, which are pretty gay even by Victorian friendship standards. (Victorians had much more affectionate friendships than modern people usually do.)

The plot comes to a head with the visit of the grieving German neighbor, who thinks he has figured out what killed his niece—it was a mysterious lovely guest she’d been hosting. Then there is the usual telling of long backstories and the fun vampire-killing stuff, much as you would expect, all of which is still a great deal of fun for all that it’s been mimicked too many times to be at all surprising.

One thing I particularly liked about this story is that it’s in epistolary form, but there’s little to indicate who the letters are to, except that they are written several years afterwards, and that Laura is writing to some sort of lady who lives in a city, and so feels the need to apologize and explain a lot about what it’s like living in deep seclusion in a castle in the woods. Since I am a lady who lives in a city, this was pretty cool, as it sounded like Laura was addressing me particularly rather than like I was snooping on somebody’s letters.

One thing I liked somewhat less was that the ebook I picked up was an “illustrated” version, but instead of contemporary illustrations (which were cool; I have seen them elsewhere), they were modern photos of random Goth ladies—very pretty pictures, but that didn’t really seem to fit. But I suppose you get what you pay for when you decide to get the free ebook versions of public-domain classics.

Overall, though, Carmilla was a fun, quick read, and why the hell aren’t there more lesbian vampires? Or lady vampires at all, really—there were a lot of gay vampires back when people still cared about Anne Rice and obviously there have recently been quite a lot of broody heterosexual dude vampires, but the ladies always seem to be secondary characters. More female main vampires, please! Or perhaps I’m just reading the wrong books, in which case, will somebody point me toward the right ones?

Current Mood: in pain
Current Location: lower allston
Current Music: none

I believe it was last summer, shortly after Readercon, that I read the first of Alaya Dawn Johnson’s Zephyr Hollis novels, Moonshine. I liked it a lot! And yet, because my TBR list is an unwieldy monster of monstrous proportions, I just yesterday got around to reading the sequel, Wicked City, even though I’d bought the books at the same time.

Wicked City continues the adventures of Zephyr Hollis, chronically broke charity worker and activist, as she tries to find a way to break the magical bond that she accidentally established between herself and her mischevious djinn love interest, Amir, at the end of the last book. Not only is breaking the bond between a djinn and a “vessel” remarkably difficult, but her refusal to use the bond to make any wishes is causing a buildup of power that threatens to destabilize… er, something magical involving the djinni; I sort of breezed through that bit. Zephyr’s quest is continually interrupted with other crises, the main one being that over a dozen vampires have mysteriously died after drinking the vampire liquor Faust, which everyone thought had been toned down enough after the last book to not be overly dangerous. Zephyr is also under investigation by the Other vice squad for harboring an illegal child vampire, in a bargain with the Mayor of New York City to bring him the slightly deranged child vampire Nicholas, and trying to help her investigative reporter friend Lily get scoops on the mysterious vampire deaths situation. Additionally, her roommate Aileen, an Irish immigrant with a touch of “the Sight” that seems to have gotten more powerful in recent months, is running herself ragged doing fortune-tellings for the Spiritualist Society. Oh, and her daddy, the infamous vampire hunter, has gone either crazy or missing or both.

Set in a dirty, glamorously gritty Prohibition-era New York City, Wicked City is at least as much fun as the first book, although I kind of wish I’d remembered more of the plot developments in the first book; apparently they didn’t really stick with me and then the sequel was confusing at times. Zephyr is a stubborn, emotional, and ultimately likeable heroine; nearly all of the secondary characters are amusingly outrageous. I feel like the plot threads are balanced slightly better in this book than in the first one, and the book ends with a very intriguing setup for a sequel, although I don’t know if Johnson has actually written a third book in this series yet.

I don’t really have any sort of deep literary thoughts on this one, which is odd since it at least touches on basically every social issue that was around in 1920s New York, and invents some new ones. They’re all kinda… familiar to me, at this point, I guess. None of them were handled in ways that struck me as particularly terrible; neither did they provide any sort of particularly astute commentary—it was just like “It’s the twenties! Everyone is terrible to each other! That sucks; now let’s go find some illegal gin and tonics to drink until we feel better!” which is fair enough, I suppose.

I reread Holly Black's fabulous decadent vampire novel The Coldest Girl in Coldtown for BSpec book club! I adored it just as much the second time around and I particularly enjoyed being able to subject book club to my long rambly opinions about the meanings and evolution of the vampire myth. The original review is here.

And don't forget this bit of very important life advice from Bela Lugosi (as portrayed by Martin Landau): "If you vant to make out with a young lady, take her to see Dracula!"

After last weekend’s wacky hijinks with Etiquette and Espionage, I was luckily able to immediately get hold of the sequel, Curtsies and Conspiracies, by Gail Carriger. Curtsies and Conspiracies follows Sophronia Angelina Temminick as she returns for her second semester at Mademoiselle Geraldine’s Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Qualit-Tay, a school in a large dirigible that trains young gentlewomen to be spies.

The main plot in this novel concerns another crystalline valve, no longer a prototype, and smaller than the plot valve in the last book. Adorable Baby Genevieve thinks this one has to do with protocols rather than communications, which, being something to do with real telecommunications instead of purely Carrigerian steampunk technobabble, is the single thing in the book I had the hardest time getting my head around (Reason I Am Not An Engineer #34825976389274573289574). It also seems to have something to do with Sophronia’s flibbertigibbet roommate, Dimity Plumleigh-Teignmott, the daughter of evil geniuses but who just wants to be a regular proper lady and wear sparkly things. Or possibly with her younger brother Pillover, a sulky but ultimately kindhearted ten-year-old student at Bunsen’s academy for evil geniuses. At any rate, Dimity is nearly kidnapped by some thugs on multiple occasions, until the final act of the story when she actually is kidnapped and we start figuring out what’s going on, but of course I’m not going to tell you what it was.

Sophronia spends much of the first half of the book being ostracized by her friends as a result of getting distressingly high marks on her midyear exams, so she hangs out with Vieve and Soap instead. Soap, predictably but quite charmingly, is developing into an awkward love interest that Sophronia is in utter denial about, because she has espionage to do. Something is up with the odious Monique de Pelouse, who is not going to be finishing after all, but who is planning a dreadfully lavish coming-out ball in London. Something else seems to be up with a bunch of the teachers, including the unfortunately moustachioed but otherwise very dapper vampire etiquette teacher, Professor Braithewope. Things get even more complicated when the finishing school acquires guests—and the guests are boys. Specifically, they are one Professor Shrimpdittle from Bunsen’s, and a host of Bunsen students, including Pillover Plumleigh-Teignmott, a chinless family friend of Dimity’s named Lord Dingleproops, and an arrogant, broody, and very wealthy Viscount’s heir named Felix Golborne, Lord Mersey, who develops a fantastically irritating crush on Sophronia. Dingleproops and Mersey are a part of a new clique at Bunsen’s that seems to be Gail Carriger’s dig at disaffected teenage Goth steampunks, as these guys brood a lot, dress predominantly in black with brass/bronze accents, sew gears to their clothes to no useful purpose, and wear eyeliner. They also are dreadfully snobbish and like going to parties and spiking the punch. I want to condescendingly pinch all their cheeks and then hand them all over to the Lady of the Manners for some finishing.

There are some very fun cameos by characters who either show up in or are deaded by the Parasol Protectorate series, including the dewan, the old potentate, the Lord Woolsey before Conor Maccon becomes Lord Woolsey (Maccon only shows up indirectly, via Sidheag’s dialogue about “Gramps”), Countess Nasdasdy, and some other Westminster Hive members. But the crowning glory of cameos goes to the brief but memorable carriage lift Sophronia gets from Lord Akeldama, who, in a very Lord Akeldama-ish fashion, insists upon being in no way involved in anything but seems interested in possibly recruiting Sophronia for not-getting-involved purposes when she is finished. I fervently hope this means more Lord Akeldama in the rest of the series, because Lord Akeldama is perfection itself. I want to be Lord Akeldama when I grow up, even though I think I’d be terribly unsuited to it.

Sophronia is an unabashedly wish-fulfillment-y character and I am not complaining, because everything about her and her situations is so colorful and wacky-hijink-related. I think the thing that really is the problem with most wish-fulfillmenty characters are that they are boring and there is often a lack of tension, but the multiple plot threads Sophronia keeps juggling—particularly her moral dilemmas about an attempt at character assassination that she’s really not properly trained how to do—keeps things fast-paced, and everything and everyone is just too clever and bizarre to be boring. It’s sort of like Victorian teenage girl James Bond (which, as a girl who likes Victorian things, I like better than regular James Bond, but apparently a lot of people find James Bond not at all boring, is what I’m getting at).

I am desolated that I have to wait several months for the sequel and for the beginning of the Custard Protocol series. Whatever shall I do with myself?

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Entries tagged with vampires

Duo ain't got nothing on these scary owls

Annotations from beyond the grave

A game about two of my favorite things (vampires and mail)

It cannot be the oupir

Returning to Styria

Emails from the polycula

"A pariah even among demons"

Ancient fears and urges that have plagued us since the dawn of time

My (6000M) subs (800F, 500F, 40M) are unionizing

For blood and money

This is what the drowned hear

The Athena Club reconvenes

All this has happened before, and all this will happen again

In which God is dead

It's been a while since I read a good vampire story

Of Scotland and Steel-bladed Fans

Old schlosses and rapturous affections

Vampire Prohibition hijinks

This is the world I reread with my terrible mercy

More floating teenage steampunk spies, because why not