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Dracula is of course full of queer potential, but sadly, Lucy Westenra’s desire to have three husbands goes largely unexplored on the page. S.T. Gibson’s new novella,
A Dowry of Blood, responds to the latent queerness of the original with a page-turning, heartbreaking retelling of the lives of Dracula’s brides. Told from the perspective of Constanta, Dracula’s eldest wife, the book follows her journey through Europe at his side. Centuries pass in a blur in this haunting retelling that features queer romance, abuse, the ennui of undeath, and the ghosts of intergenerational trauma as Constanta’s immortal beloved becomes increasingly paranoid and controlling. If you liked Dracula for its own sake for the epistolary style, the obsession with train tables, the 19th century prose know that this book has a decidedly different feel to it. It’s not a book about humans confronting monsters; it’s about monsters reckoning with their own monstrousness. But if you love psychologica