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Mar. 18th, 2026 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsBecause Becky Mahoney and I know each other, I boosted a Bluesky giveaway for her upcoming vampire novel Thrall (coming out next month!) in the spirit of friendship and then was somewhat surprised to discover that I had in fact won the giveaway -- surprised but delighted, obviously, since I've loved all of her previous books even when they weren't LUCY CENTRIC DRACULA RIFFS!! focused around a COLLEGE PIRATE RADIO STATION!!!
The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.
Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.
Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!
It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.
Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler to say that this one goes out to the Lucy/Mina shippers. (RIP to Jonathan; someday I'll read a Dracula riff that is at all invested in Mina/Jonathan but this is not the one, and as RIPs to Jonathan go I'll take Lucy/Mina over Mina/Dracula any day of the week, month or year.)
The central character of Thrall is Lucy Easting, who has just transferred into beautiful, isolated, mountainside Rollins University from community college, in a bid to get away from her stressed and depressed mother and live a life she's excited about for a change.
Alas! her first college party results in a couple of neck puncture marks, a marked tendency to experience severe migraines in sunlight, and a tragic susceptibility to the ominous vampire voice in her head that occasionally takes over her consciousness and directs her towards uncharacteristic action.
Fortunately! the college is full of prospective allies who are willing to take a chance on Lucy despite her regrettable thrall situation, including but not limited to the host of the local college late-night radio show, who has been a target of the vampire since her sophomore year and has been using the airwaves to try and fight back; Lucy's RA, a determined young woman with very nice arms, who came to the school to investigate after a terrible fate befell her high school ex-boyfriend Jonathan; and the very nice, normal party host who has no previous vampire experience but feels just terrible about the whole situation and is not about to relinquish responsibility for sorting the situation out! it was her party!!
It's a really charming book on a number of levels, but my favorite thing about it as a Dracula riff specifically is how much it's thematically invested in Lucy as a side character -- the narrative is consistently very clear that the vampire is not particularly interested in Lucy; he's obsessed with Athena the radio show host and everything else he's doing is part of his elaborate cat-and-mouse game with her, including incidentally overturning Lucy's life as a by-the-by -- and how Lucy makes the book her own story anyway by sheer force of determination not to be cut out of it. Lucy's energy really drives the book: she wants to live, and she wants to live a life on her own terms, and she's not about to let one horrible encounter take that away from her.
Also, I think it's not a huge spoiler to say that this one goes out to the Lucy/Mina shippers. (RIP to Jonathan; someday I'll read a Dracula riff that is at all invested in Mina/Jonathan but this is not the one, and as RIPs to Jonathan go I'll take Lucy/Mina over Mina/Dracula any day of the week, month or year.)
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Date: 2026-03-19 08:18 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2026-03-19 02:49 pm (UTC)I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to add more lesbians to Varney. A college setting would be easy.
But doing it would involve forcing someone to actually read all the way through it. With attention.
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Date: 2026-03-19 04:37 pm (UTC)The author was paid by the typeset line,[1] so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages[2] and 232 chapters.[3] Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.[4]
The story has a confused setting. While ostensibly set in the early eighteenth century,[7] there are references to the Napoleonic Wars and other indicators that the story is contemporary to the time of its writing in the mid-nineteenth century.
It sounds like the 19th century Riverdale.
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Date: 2026-03-19 05:05 pm (UTC)It is, indeed and famously, a hot mess. I've read and enjoyed a fair amount of Victorian literature and found it nigh unreadable.
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Date: 2026-03-20 06:56 am (UTC)I seem to recall that Jim "Yog Sysop" Macdonald had a long-standing and decidedly irreverent interest in Varney the Vampire during the glory days of GEnie's SFRT (Science Fiction RoundTable, for the benefit of DW readers who weren't on hand during the rise of Compu$Serve, Prodigy, and MySpace), but Ghod only knows where one would try to track down a record of that material....
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Date: 2026-03-20 02:41 pm (UTC)As far as I know, his Varney readthrough never migrated off the SFRT and onto Dueling Modems, the successor system the SFRT admins spun up. Very little content did, except what users themselves did. (Source: I was one of those sysadmins.) It's possible some of the Varney material was archived, but archiving the internets wasn't very common back then.
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Date: 2026-03-19 02:44 pm (UTC)now that my govt mandated yell is over. this sounds delightful. looking forward
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Date: 2026-03-21 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-03-19 03:01 pm (UTC)How much a University Novel is this, where Pamela Dean's Tam Lin is a 10?
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