Fiction Reviews
Brides
(2026) Charlotte Cross, Nightfire, £14.99, trdpbk, 391pp, ISBN 978-1-035-05927-0
Before Dracula there were…Brides. 'Come to me, and be mine for eternity'. When Mafalda journeys to Budapest to care for her grieving aunt, her secret love, Lucy, hurries from London to comfort her, with chaperone and lady's maid in tow. But lady's maid Alice, blessed and cursed with the Sight, is tormented by terrifying visions. When chaperone Eliza falls prey to a disturbing wasting illness, the women hope to seek the healing waters of Transylvania. At a nobleman's invitation, they set out for Castle Dracula. In the depths of the forest, miles from civilisation, their host reveals his true intentions; a monstrous ambition which will tear the women apart. And not all of them will survive.
Cross' story begins with a brief two-paragraph prologue before unfolding across twelve parts and concluding with an epilogue. Like Dracula, it is an epistolary novel, told through letters, journal entries, diary extracts and medical reports. Apart from the very gothic lettering giving us the title of the novel, the cover is striking because of the image of a woman looking upwards, her head covered in lace, with the pattern where her eyes should be, giving her a creepy blind look, perhaps one of blind devotion, looking up to a lord and master, maybe even a god. Striking it is, it does remind me of the cover of Johanna Van Veen’s My Darling Dreadful Thing.
Cover aside, this is Cross’ first novel, and it is a good one, delivering more than a vampire story, as it is a novel about female friendship, loyalty and desire, themes which anchor the supernatural horrors that follow.
Having said that, it does have a few problems. The first is the timeline of the novel which flits between decades, possibly in a way to hide a major reveal until the end, but it is slightly confusing.
Another problem is the pacing. For sure, it is creepy, and eerie with a lot of atmosphere and claustrophobic terror which combines well with great characterisation and a good sense of history and geography, but it is slow in places as Cross lays out a mystery for the women, and us, to solve. There is also the old epistolary way of telling the story, a device I love when it is handled correctly like in some of Peter Straub’s novels like Ghost Story where we get tales within tales and a variety of telling them. While it can be argued that it kills the tension and the story a little bit because we know the author of these fragments, we are certainly in the moment and the minds of the teller as they experience a variety of emotions from love and intimacy to fear and dread. A minor distraction is the presence of another central character named Lucy, a choice that inevitably evokes comparisons with Lucy Westenra from Stoker's novel.
Stoker’s Dracula is a novel that casts a long shadow over horror fiction, and while not the first vampire story it sets out many of the rules of engagement for this sort of fanged fiction. One of the things about canonical novels is that they are always open to reinterpretation, and being tackled from a different angle. In Stoker’s novel, three 'sisters' live in Castle Dracula, preying upon anyone who comes to the castle, and they want to prey on Jonathan Harker, but Dracula needs him alive for a little while longer and slakes the sisters’ thirst with an infant to feed on. Fortunately, Harker escapes and the sisters are not seen until the end of the novel when they confront Van Helsing and Mina, before Van Helsing ventures to the castle and destroys them. Cross takes the idea of those three sisters – who are they and how did they get there, and runs with it in a story about the friendship and love between four women – Mafalda and Lucy, her chaperone, Eliza, and Alice, the maid – as they stand against the darkness that is Count Dracula and the future he promises them as his brides.
All in all, Brides is a good first novel and a must-read if you like your vampire fiction, particularly when it riffs off Dracula in such an original way, being a prequel and a sequel to some extent, and I for one, will look out for what Cross does next.
Ian Hunter
[Up: Fiction Reviews Index | SF Author: Website Links | Home Page: Concatenation]
[One Page Futures Short Stories | Recent Site Additions | Most Recent Seasonal Science Fiction News]