Roses are red, violets are blue, this book is grim and it’s good for you
Synopsis
Alderose Mortimer is no stranger to grief. As she roams from one bleak countryside village to another, killing monsters for coin, she’s haunted by the loss of her first love, slain on their wedding day with two puncture wounds in his neck.
So when a fateful contract brings her face to face with a vampire, Alderose is determined to rid the world of another monster. But Lord Iestyn of Wreymoor Hall has a more tantalising if Alderose breaks the curse imprisoning him in his crumbling manor, he’ll help her hunt down the vampire who murdered her husband.
Night after night, the manor squeezes Alderose in its rotting grip, and she begins to question her own humanity. Iestyn’s seductive hunger stirs the darkness growing inside her, feeding her own desire for revenge. If she surrenders to it, she might finally get the chance to bury her grief, along with the monster who took everything from her. Or, it could cost her what remains of her soul.
Vengeance has never tasted so bloody…
Review
If there’s an equivalent of an author triathlon, it must be doing three genres in succession. In which case, all the medals go to N C Scrimgeour, because after an award-nominated sci-fi trilogy, followed by one of the best dark fantasy trilogies of the last decade, she’s now written a gothic horror vampire one-shot (out October 31, fittingly) and for those still recovering from the emotional highs of her Sea of Souls Saga and wondering whether she can hack it down in the murky crypts of fright fic, then the answer is hell yes, literally in the case of the plot. Picture this: Imagine if the Bride from Kill Bill was a Witcher and then make it Dracula but add a dash of devilish Dante, and you’re not even close to how exceptional this short but blood-drainingly addictive entry into the horror genre is. Scrimgeour throws down every cliché in the book: a town plagued by monsters, a seemingly alive vampire mansion, and deals with the devil, but with prose this good and a monster hunter–vampire relationship this delightfully and subtly ambiguous and devastating, you remember why these clichés exist, and how superb Scrimgeour’s character work continues to be. This is her shortest book yet but I desperately didn’t want it to end; life, like a vampire, is a cruel thing.
The story centres on Alderose Mortimer, a grief-stricken monster hunter who roams villages completing Witcher-style contracts while hoping to one day get vengeance on the vampire who killed her groom on her wedding day. Her world is thrown upside down when, while hunting in the sleepy English village of Caelfeld, she gets an offer from another vampire, Lord Iestyn of the nearby Wreymoor Hall: if she helps him break the curse that has trapped him in his decrepit manor, he’ll help her hunt her husband’s murderer. But as the title of this book might suggest, vengeance comes with a catch; and as she grows closer to Iestyn, she risks losing her soul for the sake of her vengeance.
Now in her previous dark fantasy trilogy, Scrimgeour inventively utilised the creatures and myths of Scottish folklore. She does a similar trick here in this horror one-shot, but this time with the English kind; the story takes place in Shropshire (for the Americans: in the West Midlands, on the border with Wales) and Alderose encounters a number of creatures from English folklore as she helps the vampire break his curse for her own ends. This makes for a delicious real-folklore-meets-Witcher-side-quest concoction (if you’ve not heard of the Redcap, prepare to be disgusted). Another trait from her previous work is strong here: Scrimgeour’s capacity for devilish plot twists layered beneath plot twists that comes to the fore in the final act, which is a barrage of outrageous curtain reveals.
But the real star of this delicious vampire gothic is the relationship between Alderose and her temporary ally in her quest for vengeance, the trapped vampire lord Iestyn. Be warned, this isn’t a vampire trying to be good or a budding romance on the cards here; and to be clear I’m not even closing in on spoiler territory by admitting this as Scrimgeour has made this brutally clear in her book marketing: tragic gothic, no happy endings, etc. Instead, as these two grow closer, bonded by their hunger in different ways (respectively: to be free to feed, to kill the guy who ruined her wedding), Scrimgeour is interested in different questions than will they run off happily ever after, such as whether vengeance is worth it if you must ally with a monster; the cost to your soul; and, even more interestingly for me, the bonds that draw doomed people together and how this stretches beyond morality. Every scene between them is a joy, written in gloriously over-the-top gothic intensity that never falls into cliché thanks to the power of Scrimgeour’s good writing. Her fantasy trilogy was marked by the subtle character work of those scarred by vengeance and grief trying to relate to each other, and in the gothic genre, this works just as well: a reminder of the power of a tragic, raw, gothic.
Overall, full of gothic tragedy, brutality, and more grim, bloody truths than a Christmas family reunion, this utterly superb tale of a monster hunter’s pact with a vampire to seek her vengeance swaps hopeful romance for doomed desire and amorality and is all the more memorable for it. Scrimgeour’s deft jump from first-rate dark fantasy to pitch-perfect horror shows that in any genre, she is one of the must-read authors of the moment.
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