New Release Notes 08/23/22 - Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste

Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste

“Gritty & dark, RELUCTANT IMMORTALS consumed me from the first page to the very last. The horrors of being irrevocably changed by someone without your consent. Of trying to regain a sense of agency and make our own choices free from what was done to us. It asks: are we doomed to be monsters if we come from one?” - Reader Voracious

We are huge fans of Circe and Mexican Gothic here at the shop, and this is a stunning hybrid of the two. A retelling of two classic tales told from the perspective of scorned and traumatized women, this book puts our heroines squarely in the driver’s seat, right in 1967 Los Angeles. They make mistakes, they fight back, they fail, they fail better; in other words, Gwendolyn Kiste make these characters human, a welcome change to how these characters were originally conceived.

From three-time Bram Stoker Award–winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature—from Lucy Westnera, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967.

Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel that looks at two men of classic literature, Dracula and Mr. Rochester, and the two women who survived them, Bertha and Lucy, who are now undead immortals residing in Los Angeles in 1967 when Dracula and Rochester make a shocking return in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.

Combining elements of historical and gothic fiction with a modern perspective, in a tale of love and betrayal and coercion, Reluctant Immortals is the lyrical and harrowing journey of two women from classic literature as they bravely claim their own destiny in a man’s world.