I have been longing for a Carmilla retelling that actually scratches the itch and I've finally found it with this novel, though there's less of a focus on the romance here than there is on female agency. Given the story this book wanted to tell, I think that decision worked out. Alas, I still search for my perfect lesbian vampire romance (that probably will never exist unless I write it myself LOL).

This book definitely handles its main theme well. It's absolutely dripping with a barely contained rage that didn't fail to get me worked up. I did have the unfortunate timing of reading this at the same time as playing Silent Hill f, which touches on extremely similar themes with a lot more nuance, so I did find this book's approach more heavy-handed in comparison. That being said, I don't think it blunts the impact of what it's trying to get across in any significant way.

Our main character is the perfect vehicle for navigating the story. She's a pretty exasperating viewpoint to read from for most of the book, and I can see how her endless thought loops can come across as repetitive and tiresome, but I think this approach establishes just how difficult it is to unlearn internalized misogyny and break free from the self-fulfilling prophecy of chronic loneliness. Big props to the author for getting across just how exhausting it is to interact with women who refuse to decenter men LOL I was really empathizing with Carmilla for most of this book 😭 Lenore, girly, your husband isn't SHIT.

Speaking of Carmilla, I was kind of disappointed with how her character was handled. She functions more as a device to instigate change in our protagonist rather than feeling like a real person with thoughts and feelings outside of that purpose. I'm pretty sure this was intentional, but I still crave a retelling of the original novella where she's given more agency. She works well within her given purpose here, though, and I did enjoy the tension between her and Lenore, though I wanted a lot more of it. But as a yearning mega-enjoyer, that's a tall order to fill.

The writing itself is nothing to write home about, and I already mentioned the repetitive nature of the first 2/3 of the book. That being said, despite having what I would describe as mostly functional prose with the occasional poignant sentence or two, the book does a very good job of establishing an atmosphere and a setting. It nails the Gothic claustrophobia and dread, and I really enjoyed the temporal setting of the Industrial Revolution. The clash between high society and industry... 😫 It's so tasty. I really need to read more books that have that contrast going on.

The ending, as is usually the case with me, was pretty disappointing. I think I have the unpopular opinion here, but I think the book was at its strongest before it really started picking up. Given the meandering pace the novel establishes in its first part, the abrupt way the climax kicks off and the equally abrupt way it all concludes felt incongruous. I wish we got a bit more time to see Lenore's newly awakened scheming and manipulative side. It's always frustrating when a novel spends hundreds of pages building up to an event only to spend about 20 pages on said event, and that's especially true here when so much time is spent building tension.

As far as 2025 sapphic vampire releases go, this is easily the best one I've read this year, and the best Carmilla retelling I've read in general (glares in the general direction of An Education in Malice) but I still continue my search for the one that REALLY grips me.

3.75/5!

Not many thoughts on this besides what I've already said for the previous two: Art is good. Pacing is WAY too quick and the actual novels remain the best way to experience the series.

I'll prob still keep reading these as they release though, for The Nostalgia.

3/5!

Ohhh, everybody is going to hate me for enjoying this substantially more than both Best Served Cold and Red Country, huh SDJSJDJD. I always love an anthology, particularly when the stories are all set in the same world and that being one which I happen to be very fond of. So I really enjoyed this reading experience. More than most people seemed to have, anyway.

One of my biggest joys of reading the First Law standalones was coming across characters I was already familiar with previously, and this book has that feeling in spades. Even with the stories I was less fond of, there was at least one character cropping up that had me excited at their appearance. But there were quite a few stories here that I really loved!

The crowning jewel of the anthology for me, and is it really any surprise, was A Beautiful Bastard (also known by my lovingly crafted alternate title: Salem Rews' Gay Awakening). Give me any Glokta content and I am all fucking over it. But even accounting for favorite character bias, I think the placement and craft of it is just really tasty. I love how the anthology both opens and closes with stories absolutely dripping in dread and dramatic irony. ABB worked better for me than Made A Monster, but that's purely because I'm far more of a Glokta enjoyer than a Logen enjoyer. Getting to see my problematic fav at the absolute height of his Main Character Syndrome was such a treat. AGHHH I'm always a sucker for the Doomed Hero trope. Particularly when said Hero dooms himself through his own damn hubris. Don't get me started on this because I won't shut up about Glokta and Icarus imagery. Oughhh, Joe, you have truly penned one of the Characters of All Time. I adore this horrible, beautiful bastard 😭

The biggest surprise of the anthology though was how much I enjoyed the recurring stories surrounding Shev and Javre. Give me an entire book of JUST THEM, I BEG OF YOU. Their banter is absolutely elite, and I love Abercrombie's penchant for writing funky little disaster lesbians between this book and The Devils. I now fully forgive him for whatever the hell was going on at the end of Last Argument of Kings.

But seriously. Usually I really dislike when an author or creator tries to retroactively make new characters relevant to previously established events in a series by shoehorning them in, but I don't even care at this point because I just love these two girlies so much. Javre is the warrior (ex-)priestess of my dreams and Shev is the perfect representation of a disaster lesbian who keeps going back to the same emotionally unavailable situationship. She's a damn MESS and I adore her. Every time one of their stories popped up I was more excited than I was for most of the other backstories for previously established POV characters we got. If they never pop up in the series again I am going to be absolutely DEVASTATED. Needless to say I am very optimistic for the female characters in Age of Madness after loving these two so much.

I'm not going to shout out any other stories specifically cuz this'll get too long, but overall this was a really successful anthology! There was only one story that I was really just completely meh on and none that I hated. Some felt like unnecessary filler, but I wasn't dragging my feet through any of them.

There are 13 stories in this collection, and I ended up with an average rating of 3.75/5, which is RIDICULOUSLY high for a short story collection for me!

Man, I really wanted to enjoy this more than I did. I think the bones here are really interesting, but the execution ended up falling flat for me.

I really enjoyed how this book chose to focus on the horrors of lateral aggression in queer spaces. Pretty much all of the queer horror I've read focuses on the top-down oppression of cisheteronormative society on queer people, so this was a refreshing and very needed take.

The condemnation of TERF rhetoric, particularly in the lesbian separatist movement and its resulting communities, is the main idea in play here, but the book also touches on gender essentialism in sapphic spaces, as well as the simultaneous fetishization and dehumanization of fat, trans, and masculine women in those spaces. My favorite character here was the fat masculine lesbian who is grappling both with being objectified due to her body type and with being dehumanized due to her masculinity. This kind of critique of sapphic communities is extremely hard to find in fiction, so I'm always very pleasantly surprised when it pops up. The way this novel explores its themes is certainly its biggest strength, even if I do wish it went a bit deeper at times.

I also really appreciated how messy all of these characters were allowed to be. So many novels with queer characters at the forefront are obsessed with having them say and do all of the "correct" things all the time, resulting in characters that feel like cardboard and a reader who feels like they're being lectured to. I have my problems with the lack of consistency in the character writing, but I can say with certainty that none of them were ever boring or ever felt like a stand-in for the author's opinions. For a book like this, that's quite the accomplishment. I have to respect the author for that level of ballsiness given the diminishing reading comprehension of the average reader and the political climate being what it is.

My main problem with this book is that... I just wasn't interested in the plot. This is both a result of the atrocious pacing and the predictability of what little plot points there were. The predictability you can maybe make an argument for (a commentary on the ubiquity of transmisogynistic scapegoating), but I find the pacing a lot harder to forgive. Put the two together and I was just never invested in what was actually happening, despite having more than a casual investment in some of the characters. By the time the book actually starts picking up, I had already gotten a good idea of where it was all leading to, which was disappointing.

The writing itself was also really hit-or-miss for me. I appreciate how disorienting it is, given the psychedelic subject matter, but I just wanted it to be more cohesive, as contradictory as that sounds. There's random instances of head-hopping that I think could have really worked, but there's no rhyme or reason to when this happens, so it just feels jarring each time. There's also a LOT of repetitive dialogue, which again, makes sense because practically all of these characters are high as a kite, but it happens even when they're supposedly sober, and doesn't really seem to serve a purpose other than taking up pagetime for things that could have served the story more effectively. Certainly did not help with the already existing pacing issues.

And the writing of the dialogue itself... Sometimes it really worked, sometimes it was really cringey. I can't argue that it certainly gave the characters more personality, but it also felt extremely dated more often than not. Maybe it's just because I was very active on 2010s Tumblr so my reaction was more visceral LOL I can't believe I read the word "truscum" in a book published in 2025 😭

Like I mentioned before, there's also a lack of consistency in the character writing that bugged me. Obviously in any novel you're going to have some characters that are more developed and nuanced than others. That being said, even characters who had similar amounts of page time varied in quality. Sunny Delight is the main character that comes to mind. I really feel like Sunny D's potential was squandered by the expedited and abrupt conclusion of her character arc. Skillet also suffers from the same problem. But I think the most egregious example of inconsistency is Pickles. In a book that loves poking fun at the meaninglessness of online queer discourse while also maintaining a level of seriousness, the way his character was approached just felt... completely mean-spirited and played entirely for laughs in a way that literally every other character wasn't, despite their flaws. I can't say it didn't ruffle my feathers a bit as an agender lesbian. But maybe I'm reading too much into it. The singular instance of providing the main antagonist's POV for one chapter just to provide her backstory only to never get her POV again was also pretty immersion-breaking. It also didn't help make her a more fleshed-out character in the long run, so it felt completely unnecessary.

I also can't help but feel like the background plot with Lazarus Sloane and the lumber mill was underutilized. It really felt like a scrapped plot thread that was left in for some reason, and I wish more was done with it. There was quite a bit of time spent on it, both in-text and in the chapter epigraphs, for it to end up almost completely irrelevant in the end.

I do think this book is worth reading, particularly if you're a big themes reader and/or you just want a batshit time. I can definitely say I've never read anything quite like this before, but I'm left with the feeling that it could've been much better than it ended up being.

3.25/5.