Over the course of several series, such as The Shades of Magic (2015-) and Villains (2013-) and various standalones—notably the Locus-nominated The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020)—V. E. Schwab (who also writes under the name Victoria Schwab) has established herself as a writer of well-crafted fantasies featuring ambiguously motivated but fully rounded characters. I have found her always reliable, a step above much of mainstream fantasy, and this latest standalone novel does not disappoint, overcoming its somewhat trope-y marketing (Toxic! Lesbian! Vampires!). It’s a kind of darker twin to Addie LaRue, but one that for me didn’t quite match the enchantment of the earlier novel, although that may be a matter of taste.
Schwab certainly establishes the mood right away. A child in a Spanish village in 1521 meets, and is inexplicably drawn to, a mysterious widow dressed in grey. The widow invites gossip and suspicion among the villagers and curiosity from the child. The night before the widow leaves, a gentleman dies in his sleep. Ten years later, the child, now a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a wealthy viscount, meets the widow again. The widow has not aged at all.
Alice, in 2019, has travelled from Scotland to escape her past and to study at Harvard. She is a little shy, a little awkward, and shadowed by grief, but is persuaded by her roommates to go to a party where she meets and hooks up with an alluring young woman. The next morning, she wakes up with what feels like a colossal hangover and discovers to her horror that she has no heartbeat, sunlight is painful to her, her teeth are suddenly sharper, and she has a terrible thirst for blood. Her knowledge of popular culture helps her conclude that she’s become a vampire, and she sets off seeking vengeance on the woman who turned her.
It is 1827, and Charlotte, after having been caught kissing a girl in the garden at home, has been sent to her aunt to be turned into a proper young lady. At her first ball, Charlotte meets and is befriended by a slightly older, beautiful widow named Sabine. They become lovers; before long Sabine reveals that she is a vampire, and offers to “plant” Charlotte in the “midnight soil,” thus making her a vampire as well.
This dark and gothic novel is dedicated to “the ones who hunger—for love, for time, or simply to be free.” It exemplifies such a Romantic spirit that one almost expects Lord Byron to come striding through at some point. The main characters, especially Sabine and Charlotte, are Romantic Heroes in female form: rash, solipsistic, rejecting and escaping from the bonds of formal society, ready to accept a kind of death-in-life for the chance at more time, more experience, and more passion. Charlotte, in the early nineteenth century, reads Frankenstein (1818) along with her close friend, the girl she kissed. Her friend doesn’t like it because there’s too much horror in it; Charlotte thinks to herself, “As if love and horror could not go hand in hand.”
Many different types of love play themselves out over the course of this novel and before the eyes of the three main characters. The central relationship is between Sabine and Charlotte. It is one that starts with mutual passion, driven by Sabine’s worldliness and Charlotte’s need to escape societal conventions, but over the years it becomes toxic, as Sabine becomes more and more possessive and domineering. For her part, Alice is haunted by memories of her rebellious older sister. After the death of their mother, their father remarried; Alice wanted to love her stepmother, but her sister rejects the new family and runs away, seeking a new life, as eventually Alice does herself.
As we trace the interlocking paths of the three main characters, we meet other vampires, including couples, who may help or mentor the main characters, and whose relationships offer glimpses of alternatives to loneliness, hunger, or the toxicity of a possessive relationship. One particularly poignant episode involves Mateo, an older, more powerful vampire whom Sabine meets in Venice, and his lover Alessandro, who has chosen not to be turned even if it means that Mateo will outlive him. Alessandro is not afraid of death: “Is it life,” he asks, “if there is never death to balance it? Or is its brevity what makes it beautiful?” Sabine observes the relationship between Alessandro and Mateo, and thinks to herself:
Love.
As terrible and bottomless as hunger.
She wonders what it’s like.
Through these encounters, each of the main characters learns more about what it means to be a vampire. Mateo warns Sabine that, while they gain a greatly extended lifespan, vampires are gradually hollowed out, rotting from within “as all that made us human dies. Our kindness. Our empathy. Our capacity for fear, and love … until all that’s left is the desire to hunt, to hurt, to feed, to kill.” Similarly, another vampire whom Charlotte meets in London years later tells her, “The fact is, whether death takes you all at once, or steals pieces over time, in the end there is no such thing as immortality. Some of us just die slower than the rest.” And in the twenty-first century, at Harvard, Ezra, who runs a coffee shop as a front to provide a meeting place for vampires and other outcasts, tells Alice, “We think ourselves immortal, but we’re not. All things get hollowed out by time […] Including us. For some it will take centuries, for others only a mortal life, but one way or another, eventually, pieces of us die. The parts that made us human. Till all that’s left is hunger, and rot.”
Schwab is known for her character-driven stories, and in that respect this novel does not disappoint. Perhaps the most compelling of the three is Sabine, whose strong will and lust for life and experience drives much of the first half of the novel. As the oldest vampire of the three, more of her soul has been lost, and she is ultimately the most monstrous as well. It is unfortunate, then, that in the second half of the novel we lose her point of view, so that she mostly becomes more of a shadowy threat than someone with perhaps more motivation than simply desire for Charlotte.
Alice’s story arc is the most dynamic, and it would be suspenseful, but there are too many interruptions, both from the other voices and from Alice’s own memories of her sister. I felt this flashback plotline, despite its advancement of thematic ideas of the nature of life and death, and how it provides character motivation for Alice, to be nevertheless one too many, and I found myself wanting to say “oh come on, get ON with it,” at times. This is perhaps one overall flaw in this otherwise compelling and poetically written novel: The pacing is uneven and at times slow. There’s a lot of repetition, perhaps with some intention of demonstrating the similarity between the three women. I’ve already mentioned the meditations on immortality (or lack thereof); the same three mentor vampires teach each of the three women a poem that establishes the central metaphor of the vampiric life:
Bury my bones in the midnight soil,
plant them shallow but water them deep,
and in my place will grow a feral rose,
soft red petals hiding sharp white teeth.
Gardening and planting serves as a metaphor not just for the act of making and becoming a vampire, but for the bond between Sabine and Charlotte:
Sabine, who proves a master gardener.
And Charlotte, so eager to be tended.
So grateful she has found a hand that makes her bloom.
The imagery is lovely, but I felt it was slightly overworked. I’d also rather like a dollar for every time I read the word “feral.”
Overall, although it is marketed as an adult fantasy, this novel has the “feel” of many current YA fantasies, including the use of multiple narrators and present tense throughout. One of the justifications for the use of a present-tense narrative might be a sense of immediacy, but it does nothing here to relieve the sometimes slow pace. Admittedly I am not usually a fan of what seems to be the almost ubiquitous use of present tense in popular writing these days, although I could accept it to some extent here as representing perhaps a kind of eternal present in which the vampires exist. However, there are several long sections here in which Charlotte, Ancient Mariner-like, tells her story to Alice, and in these instances I don’t think the present tense makes sense. Nor does it in Alice’s flashback memories of her sister.
Another issue is a plot hole so large it had me rereading passages several times to make sure I hadn’t missed something. It is much too spoilery to relate in detail, but involves the convention of “inviting in.” This is a well-known aspect of vampiric lore that Schwab is careful to signal; I got a nice little pop-culture frisson when Alice’s hookup, outside her dorm room, asks, “Shall we stay out here, or are you planning to invite me in?” That this is widely accepted by all the vampires is demonstrated later when Alice meets the coffee-shop owner Ezra, who states, “After all, loneliness is just like us … It has to be invited in.” So when a significant plot revelation is founded on someone entering somewhere without being invited, I was left questioning. There may be a reason for this within the text, but it is unclear and I believe too important to go unexplained.
I mentioned at the outset that a preference for Schwab’s earlier novel, Addie LaRue, might simply be a matter of taste. I should return now to the novel’s essential Romanticism. In this latest work, Schwab’s characters, like Victor Frankenstein before them, step away from conventional life in order to seek out experience and freedom from restraint. Rather than giving up everything for love as Addie does, they seize on the opportunity for more time, a longer life, to add more to their story—even if it means not just giving up the taste of fresh coffee or cherries warm from the tree but accepting that eventually their humanity will wither and die. Perhaps I’m just a bit too old, but for me that’s a rather bleak outlook.