So many stories focus on the great romance between a human and a vampire and end with that human joining the undead in a happily ever after. But when you’re immortal, that “ever after” is a long, long time. What happens to a relationship over the course of centuries? And what if the immortal being you’ve tied yourself to isn’t the perfect romantic partner after all? S. T. Gibson explores these themes and more in her new adult fantasy novel A Dowry of Blood, which comes out on Sunday, January 31.
If you read Unspeakable: A Queer Gothic Anthology, you saw this concept briefly sketched out in Gibson’s short story “Brideprice.” Now this premise has been expanded into a full-length novel that can give proper attention to the nuanced themes of toxic relationships, emotional abuse, and reasserting one’s own identity. The story is framed as a series of confessional journal entries addressed to the narrator’s dead sire. Constanta was the first vampire bride that he created. She worships him for raising her beaten and bloodied body from the ruins of her village and giving her the power to revenge herself on her attackers. Alone with her sire for several centuries, Constanta lives only for him, shaping herself to his desires. Then he takes a second bride, Magdalena, and Constanta experiences jealousy—but also, for the first time, experiences having a friend, a sister, an equal partner. She can also see, from an objective angle, the destructive effect that her sire’s suffocating love has on his second bride. When he takes a third bride—the young and naïve Alexi—Constanta finds it unbearable to watch the same abusive behaviors she tolerated toward herself for centuries begin to break down someone so innocent. It’s time for the three brides to band together and take a stand against their powerful sire.
In the narration of this novel, Gibson turns a popular Gothic trope on its head. Works such as Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw feature a nameless narrator—a young woman whose personal identity is obscured by the story in a way that reflects her lack of agency, of credibility, of power. In A Dowry of Blood, Constanta turns the tables and instead erases the identity of her abuser. The story never names her sire, although his identity will be quite obvious to the reader. What famous vampire in literature is known to have three brides? The story also drops little hints, such as a brief mention of a couple of pesky Victorians named “the Harkers.” But by refusing to call her sire by his name, Constanta erases some of his power. The narration deftly accomplishes this by being written largely in the second person: these are Constanta’s journal entries, in which she addresses her sire directly as “you.” Coming immediately off of reading Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth, my mind has been blown to see second person be so cleverly sustained throughout a full-length novel twice in a row, while fulfilling completely different narrative purposes. In addition, using the epistolary style of journal entries for A Dowry of Blood is particularly appropriate for a Dracula reimagining.
In terms of the story’s actual content, A Dowry of Blood examines complex relationship dynamics that I’ve never encountered before in mainstream literature. The story features a queer, polyamorous quartet struggling with unequal power dynamics. It shows how romantic love can take many forms—Constanta worships her sire with mingled adoration and fear; she lusts after Magdalena’s beauty while also admiring her mind and empathizing with her emotional needs; and her desire for Alexi is secondary only to her fiercely protective, motherly instincts toward him. But while there are many scenes of falling and being in love—and a few steamy scenes of gratifying lust—A Dowry of Blood is not a romance. This is not the story of how one person—or even three people—completes another. But rather how one person can assert and express her individual identity in the midst of a tangled web of relationships. And sometimes, the only way to do that is to cut out the relationships that refuse to let you thrive. But breaking up with your vampire family isn’t so easy….
Lastly, I can’t call this review complete without marveling at Gibson’s gorgeous prose. I found myself constantly highlighting sentences and phrases that stood out to me as I read. Gibson has a way of using such beautiful words to describe ugly situations. I’ll leave you with a brief selection of some of my favorite lines:
“I craved you like maidens crave the grave, the way Death burns for human touch…”
“I still wanted to believe that I was living in a fairy tale, that I laid down every night with a prince instead of a wolf.”
“All my carefully crafted excuses for you dissolved like sugar under absinthe…”
If you’re enticed by what you see here, be sure to keep an eye out for A Dowry of Blood! You can find it on shelves at your favorite local retailer, starting Sunday. Or you can preorder the paperback online now and support The Gothic Library in the process using this Bookshop.org affiliate link. You can also preorder both the paperback and the ebook directly from the Nyx Publishing website. After you read it, be sure to come back here and share your thoughts in the comments!