Sponsored by Harper Perennial, publisher of Goodbye, Again by Jonny Sun.
Jonny Sun, the wonderfully original author of everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too, is back with a collection of essays and other writings in his unique, funny, and heartfelt style. With pieces that range from long meditations on topics like loneliness and being an outsider, to short humor pieces, conversations, and memorable one-liners. Jonny’s honest writings about his struggles with feeling productive, as well as his difficulties with anxiety and depression will connect deeply with his fans as well as anyone attempting to create in our chaotic world. It also features a recipe for scrambled eggs that might make you cry.
Welcome to Read This Book, the newsletter where I recommend one book for your TBR that I think you’re going to love! Genre fiction is my wheelhouse, and about 90% of my personal TBR, so if if you’re looking for recommendations in horror, fantasy, or romance, I’ve got you covered!
This week’s selection is one of those books that from the moment I heard about it I knew was going to 110% my thing, and one which, when I finally got my hands on it, proved to be even better than I had even imagined.
A Dowry of Blood by S.T. Gibson
S.T. Gibson had me sold on A Dowry of Blood from the moment that she announced she was working on a queer, polyamorous novel about Dracula’s brides. Dracula has been one of my favorite horror classics ever since I was a kid, so I’m always on board for adaptations, and Gibson has a style – Gothic lyricism embedded with religious imagery and abundant feeling – that proved a perfect foil for her subject. In Stoker’s original novel the Brides are but a footnote, seducing Jonathan in one chapter, foreshadowing the fate of poor Lucy Westenra, then eventually being beheaded by Van Helsing. With so little textual information to work with, Gibson has all the range in the world to tell a truly compelling novel of obsession, possession, fear, and love, and she really makes the most of it.
A Dowry of Blood is told from the perspective of Constanta, the first of three brides whom Dracula creates to be his companions over the course of the novel, and is written as a farewell letter to the man she loved and hated in equal measure. At its heart that is what the book is about, really: love, hate, and the ugly place in between where the two get blurred together. Dracula is in turns breathtakingly charming and painstakingly cruel. He collects lovers, his Brides, the way that others collect jewels, for their beauty, their fire, and sometimes even for their flaws. Through Constanta’s eyes we see both his cold emotional abuse and the tenderness he uses to reinforce it, we share in her fear and her devotion. And we cheer for her, Magdalena, and Alexi, when they finally decide that they have had enough.
I don’t know that I can do justice to the beauty of this novel in the short time I have to share it with you. All I can say is that if you love lush, poetic, gorgeous books, you don’t want to miss A Dowry of Blood.
Go forth and read!
Jessica