She Made Herself a Monster

“ The best kind of vampire story—one in which the real evil is us.” “Deliciously monstrous and demanding of our attention, Anna Kovatcheva crafts a feminist vampire story like no other.” A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut novel: in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—in truth, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons. We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster? Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers sleep: animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then she eliminates the threat, and sows seeds of hope in her wake. The village Koprivci is plagued by exceptional illness and misfortune, its children rarely surviving infancy. There, Yana meets Anka: a headstrong orphan who the villagers blame for their curse.