Lush and evocative prose brings the dark, rich world of bloodmaids and their employers to creepy, effective life, and it’s central villain, Lisavet, is a disturbingly compelling figure with plenty of secrets of her own and a capital d-dark family history. Though House of Hunger is quite a bit different than Henderson’s debut, The Year of the Witching, the ease with which both stories balance blood-soaked gore with themes of female autonomy and thorny moral questions of survival is both unique and compelling.
But things are not entirely as they seem at the House of Hunger, and as she grows closer to Lisavet and her fellow bloodmaids, she’ll begin to suspect that darker-and deadlier-forces may be at work. There, she finds herself indentured to the service of Countess Lisavet, a chronically ill woman who needs the blood from a quartet of girls just to stay alive.Īt first, life as a bloodmaid doesn’t seem all that terrible: Marion is pampered beyond her wildest dreams, educated in etiquette and history, and after seven years of employment, Marion will receive a pension that will essentially set her up for life. Dreaming of a life in the decadent North, where rich old-moneyed elites drink blood to hold on to their youth and vitality, Marion answers a newspaper advertisement seeking a bloodmaid-the girls who are paid to bleed for their betters-and is chosen for a position at the prestigious House of Hunger, one of the oldest and most notorious of its kind. House of Hunger follows the story of Marion Shaw, a young woman who toils away in the slums of the Southern town of Prane, scrubbing floors to survive as her brother wastes all their money on his drug habit. And granted, Alexis Henderson’s House of Hunger isn’t technically about vampires, as we traditionally understand them-the novel never defines the strange Northerners who only travel by night, drink blood, and indulgently party until dawn-but that’s part of what makes this story stand out from the pack. Therefore, it’s particularly notable when someone manages to put a fresh or thoughtful new spin on the genre.
From speculative fantasy and young adult fiction to dark romances and gory horror, there’s basically a book about bloodsuckers for every kind of reader. Vampire and “vampire-adjacent fiction is, pardon the pun, eternal in the publishing industry, across every kind of vertical and subgenre.
0 kommentar(er)
