What are you reading in 2025?

[Richards]

I just finished Jonathan Maberry's Relentless, so now it's on to the next in the series, Cave 13. This time Joe Ledger and the Rogue Team International is up against some newly-discovered Dead Sea Scrolls that might actually contain workable magic. (They've been up against zombies, vampires, alien technology, cyborgs, and more, so why not?)

Johnathan

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So, as expected, Lucy Undying is fantastic, especially for people who know the original Dracula well.

Dracula, of course, is an epistolary novel. Which is to say, it's told through diaries, letters, a ship's log, newspaper articles, etc. And Lucy Undying, in addition to saying "wow, Bram Stoker and his characters were extremely sexist and gross toward Lucy Westernra" also asks the question "what if some of those first person narratives in Dracula were lies?"

What results is not only a feminist take on Dracula -- if Vampire: The Masquerade is vampirism as addiction/STDs, Lucy Undying is vampirism as rape culture -- but also a great nesting doll full of twists (don't skip ahead to see whose name is on each chapter, as you'll spoil the very fun surprises).

As always, I think vampire novelists are almost always highly influenced by vampire RPGs. Not only do we have memory loss as a key component of vampires (as in Thousand Year Old Vampire, where it's the dominant theme), but we also get an amazing twist on a blood cult (this book should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to pull off a non-cliched blood cult in their VtM/VtR game), references to "the Final Death" and other items that read very much like someone inhaled a whole lot of White Wolf or Onyx Path back in the day.

I am a tough audience for vampire fiction and I think this probably the most satisfying vampire novel I can remember reading since the original Dracula.

 

[prabe]

Dracula, of course, is an epistemological novel.

I hate to be that guy, but I think the word you want here is "epistolary."

 

[gban007]

So, as expected, Lucy Undying is fantastic, especially for people who know the original Dracula well.

Dracula, of course, is an epistolary novel. Which is to say, it's told through diaries, letters, a ship's log, newspaper articles, etc. And Lucy Undying, in addition to saying "wow, Bram Stoker and his characters were extremely sexist and gross toward Lucy Westernra" also asks the question "what if some of those first person narratives in Dracula were lies?"

What results is not only a feminist take on Dracula -- if Vampire: The Masquerade is vampirism as addiction/STDs, Lucy Undying is vampirism as rape culture -- but also a great nesting doll full of twists (don't skip ahead to see whose name is on each chapter, as you'll spoil the very fun surprises).

As always, I think vampire novelists are almost always highly influenced by vampire RPGs. Not only do we have memory loss as a key component of vampires (as in Thousand Year Old Vampire, where it's the dominant theme), but we also get an amazing twist on a blood cult (this book should probably be required reading for anyone who wants to pull off a non-cliched blood cult in their VtM/VtR game), references to "the Final Death" and other items that read very much like someone inhaled a whole lot of White Wolf or Onyx Path back in the day.

I am a tough audience for vampire fiction and I think this probably the most satisfying vampire novel I can remember reading since the original Dracula.

Been a long time since read Dracula, but main takeaway i still remember from it is that Van Helsing seemed pretty bad at his job, and that to my mind it is his fault Lucy became a vampire, and I just felt sorry for Lucy.

 

[jian]

Read Entitled by Andrew Lownie, which is a biography to date of the Duke and Duchess of York - or Andrew and Fergie, since they’ve recently been stripped of those titles. Lownie is an old hand at biographies of rogue royals, having covered Louis Mountbatten and Edward VIII - he’s said that he hopes this book will help pay for his lawsuits with the Royal Family (who have repeatedly blocked his Freedom of Information requests), and I strongly suspect it will.

It also made me start reading The Story of My Life by Marie of Romania, generally considered the first royal autobiography to start showing royalty as normal (and often rather ordinary) people. Marie was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the last queen of Romania; her book came out in 1935. She’s also immortalised in this short poem by Dorothy Parker:

“Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea,
And love is a thing that can never go wrong,
And I am Marie of Romania.”