Have you never read a vampire novel? Are you interested in a bit of blood lust this Halloween season? One of these three new novels is a great place to start.

Depending on your preferences, there’s one for mystery, suspense, or detective fiction lovers. There is also a contemporary BFF road trip adventure. Lastly, there’s a literary or historical fiction choice.

If you’re already a vampire aficionado, have you read any of these yet? What did you think? And please leave a few of your favorite titles in the comments — I’m always looking for good vampire novel recommendations!

The Gathering by C.J. Tudor

The Gathering by C.J. Tudor will appeal to mystery/suspense and detective fiction readers.

“When you lived for centuries, you died for decades” (166).

Detective Barbara Atkins of the Forensic Vampyr Anthropology Department arrives in Deadhart, Alaska, to investigate an alleged murder by a vampire. In this alternative world that seems very much like our own, vampires are a protected class. They arrived in North America long before the white European colonizers and lived relatively amicably near Indigenous peoples. Due to the spread of white colonization, the vampires’ territory has dwindled over the decades, resulting in bloody clashes between humans and vampires.

“Battle lines had been drawn, between the right-wing evangelicals who believed that vamprys should be hunted down and killed (because that was what Jesus would want) and the “woke” liberals who believed that minorities should be protected and respected. Age old. Barbara had seen it with race, homosexuality, women’s rights, abortion, trans rights” (38).

To prevent more bloodshed, Detective Atkins must investigate the murder at hand and also calm the locals’ desire for revenge. Deadhart is a tiny town in rural Alaska, with a population of 673, and locals are not forthcoming. There’s also no place to store the dead body(ies) other than the deep-freeze walk-in of the only restaurant in town.

The vampires just want to live in peace. Most see murdering humans as barbaric. The leader of this colony, although very old, was turned as a child and so has “less humanity to ease the edges off her bloodthirst and fury” (268). Twenty years ago, after the murder of a human and a retaliatory attack on their compound, the local vampire colony left their homelands outside of Deadhart. Now, shortly after their return, a human teen is found dead in an old shed, clearly murdered by a vampire. Or was it a vampire?

Tudor successfully combines the detective novel with horror and smoothly incorporates current political and societal issues into this slightly alternative world. Barbara is a believable middle-aged detective whose childhood trauma led her into her chosen profession and shaped her ethics and morality. She’s out of shape and emotionally stunted, and I wish this were the kick-off of a new series. It’s one of my favorite reads of the year.

Published on April 9, 2024, by Ballantine Books / Penguin Random House. Read or listen to an excerpt here.

---

So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison

So Thirsty by Rachel Harrison is a road trip novel with a nod to Thelma and Louise and other dark tales where the best friend is always willing to help hide the body. In this case, the bodies are not hidden but left in the wake of new vampire thirst for blood so intense it can barely be controlled. So Thirsty is a horror novel with some humor. It also has violence, cruelty, gore, and a great cover.

Sloane Parker has been living a half-life, obsessed with tragedy and catastrophe and playing it so safe that she’s barely alive. Her most meaningful relationship is with her vacuum cleaner. Sloane’s philandering husband arranges a birthday weekend getaway for his wife with her BFF, Naomi, who flies in from Germany, where she’s been on tour with her boyfriend’s successful band. Unsurprisingly, Naomi is the opposite of Sloane: she is wild and impulsive and loves her longtime boyfriend passionately.

After arriving at the out-of-town cottage, the two old friends head to a bar, where a group of partiers befriends them. Sloane and Naomi leave the bar for a house party and get more than they bargained for. They soon find themselves on the road and on the run. There are some surprising twists and turns.

One of the novel’s strengths is its portrayal of a woman coming into her own who had been almost fully ingested into the patriarchy. Sloane had moments of gumption in her younger years, such as calling out her English teacher, “who rarely assigned books by women and, when he did, spoke about them in such an overtly misogynistic way” (ch. 7).

Sloane muses that Naomi had known her,

“Before I knew about things like property taxes and deductibles and inflation, about the slow drain of ordinary days and the quick disappearance of ordinary years, and about how men I’d never meet, with beliefs I don’t share, could make decisions about what I can and can’t do with my body. Before I gave in to doing what I had to and never what I wanted. Before all the choices that got me so far from the path I’d dreamt of. Before dreams became impractical” (ch. 28).

Had Sloane made choices back then, or had she been coasting? Living vicariously through her BFF? What choices will she make now that her life has been blown up?

People magazine wrote that So Thirsty is “A bloodthirsty romp with thrills, laughs, and sisterhood.” That makes this novel sound more “fun” than it is (although I had also used the word fun — and feminist — in my brief GoodReads review). There is darkness and some hard stuff amidst the laughs and sisterhood. The story lagged at times, and the characters verge on stereotypes, although there are a few unique peripheral characters (the owner of the house and the vampire they meet in the woods are standouts). Overall, the story kept me curious enough to stay on the road trip until the end. Or to the last page, anyway.

Published on September 10, 2024, by Berkeley / Penguin Random House. Read or listen to an excerpt here.

---

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk

Thirst by Marina Yuszczuk, translated by Heather Cleary, will appeal to those who enjoy historical, literary, and queer fiction. Yuszczuk is an Argentinian film critic who has published novels, short stories, and poetry collections. This is her first book published in the United States.

Thirst is an idea novel exploring death, aging, grief, and longing through the interiority of its two central characters.

The first protagonist is a woman who had been turned into a vampire long ago in Eastern Europe. She eventually makes her way to the New World and lands on the shores of Buenos Aires when it is little more than a jumble of buildings on a muddy shoreline. She watches it evolve into a cosmopolitan city as she learns how to feed herself discreetly. As the population increases, a cemetery is needed, and the vampire, who “had conquered death, but never my thirst,” entombs herself in a mausoleum. She thinks about the cemetery,

“Bodies rest below; the most important thing about the cemetery, its entire reason for being, is that it directs the gaze upward.
The cemetery opens and closes, like an oyster on the ocean floor, to reveal its contents and offer this promise to all who aspire to rest in its embrace: You are no grain of sand; you are a pearl” (ch. 8).

One day, weary and bored, the vampire is instantly intrigued by a woman she sees in the cemetery. This modern woman has sorrows and thirsts of her own, some that she is just coming to terms with. Sitting on a bench in the cemetery during a work assignment (photo for a magazine cover), she finds peace in the quiet.

“I felt something in me soften, despite my earlier worries that I might find the place depressing. But sitting there under that perfect blue sky, even if I couldn’t help thinking how all that beauty was only there to keep the corpses out of sight and out of mind, I noticed that I felt more at home than I had for a long time and that my mind was clearer, or something like that” (Part Two).

She becomes intrigued by the vampire. It all happened rather fast, and I felt I had missed something.

Thirst is written in the first person, which I sometimes found tiring, but that may be the point—to make the reader feel the characters’ feelings and situations more strongly. Whereas The Gathering and So Thirsty had some humor, Thirst is more philosophical and sensuous. I was not prepared for it. It is one of those novels that I felt the need to re-read immediately upon finishing.

Published March 5, 2024, by Dutton / Penguin Random House. Read or listen to an excerpt here.

---

These three novels are written by women. They feature female vampires who are in no way the vamps of olde. Each depicts and grapples with the constraints and plight of girls and women in society. I hope you try one of these novels, and if you do, let me know how it goes.

Happy Reading! 🧛‍♀️

PS. Thank you to my buddy John Valeri for gifting me The Gathering and to NetGalley and the publishers for review copies of Thirst and So Thirsty.

PPS. I haven’t done a ‘favorite vampire novel’ post since 2017. It might be time to write a more thorough list. (Although I’m still on the fence about The Historian.)