TV #34 of 2022: What We Do in the Shadows, season 1 A confident launch to a mockumentary sitcom with the simple yet irresistible premise of several vampires sharing a house in Staten Island. (I haven’t seen the movie that preceded this, but I understand it follows a different set of characters and isn’t directly …
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Book #115 of 2022: The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #2) 1976’s Interview with the Vampire is a modern classic of the gothic horror genre, popularizing a new variety of sympathetic bloodsucker with its brooding and homoerotic immortals. Following in 1985, this first sequel isn’t nearly so good, but it still has …
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Book #84 of 2022: A Dowry of Blood by S. T. Gibson I’m very torn on this 2021 queer gothic horror novella, which reimagines Dracula’s brides by way of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, as decadent and melancholic immortals spending centuries tangling and untangling their codependent emotions as they ravage their way across Europe. The language …
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Book #27 of 2021: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black A dark and violent YA tale, predicated on the idea that although a vampire’s first bite infects the victim with an all-consuming thirst for blood, they don’t turn fully undead until they finally give in and feed on another human in turn. There’s …
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Book #85 of 2020: The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix The tone of this novel in which a group of 90s housewives take on an undead interloper in their suburb community could so easily trip over into camp, but author Grady Hendrix avoids that by rooting the narrative in a …
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Book #192 of 2019: Sunshine by Robin McKinley This urban fantasy novel feels severely underbaked, like a first draft that was rushed to publication without any editor’s notes. The worldbuilding is vague, and the few details that we get generally arrive via infodump right when they become relevant, rather than threading organically throughout the text. …
Book #83 of 2019: Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles #1) I gave up on Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles at some point, and I don’t know if I’ll ever resume and finish the series, which seemed to get lost in its own convoluted mythology along the way. But having enjoyed the …
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Book #16 of 2019: Slayer by Kiersten White (Slayer #1) The last act of this Buffy/Angel spinoff novel is strong enough (and similar enough to the original TV shows) that I’ll probably check out its forthcoming sequel as well, but everything is unfortunately just a little tedious until then. The new gang of sixteen-year-old heroes …
Book #23 of 2018: The Little Sisters of Eluria by Stephen King I like this Dark Tower prequel novella, but it’s admittedly pretty extraneous to the regular series. The Mid-World setting makes it seem more primary, but it’s really closer in nature to a tangential Stephen King book like Black House than anything particularly essential …
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Book #143 of 2017: The Passage by Justin Cronin (The Passage #1) This post-apocalyptic vampire novel has a real early Stephen King feel to it. The most direct King parallel is probably The Stand, which similarly details the outbreak and aftermath of a deadly plague virus, but there are also classic King tropes like a …
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