There’s a Charles Manson feel to everything once Lucy and Bee arrive in SF and get caught up in the bewildering cult of personality Rochester has set up for himself (Manson operated in LA, but the point stands). He harries the pair out of LA entirely, only for them to end up in San Francisco just as Rochester is reestablishing his wealth and power there. Dracula’s ashes resist Lucy’s guardianship at every turn, and it isn’t long before parts of him break free. Not even with a stake through the heart, not even burnt to ash. In the world of Reluctant Immortals, vampires can’t die. Lucy has an equally tangible connection to her own tormentor-she keeps the ashes of Dracula in jars sculpted from his native soil, but even that does not keep him quiet.

Yes, that’s a metaphor, but it’s also the literal reality: Bee is kept alive by a malevolent fungus-like substance in her veins, the rot of Thornfield Hall and the Rochester line so profound that it continues to animate her, Rochester, and Jane. We discover, too, that they live with conditions which prevent them even from having what few jobs women could hold, and so they mostly drift through their days, keeping their past at bay by hiding it in the basement and under their skins. The skirts may be a lot shorter, but the sense of lonely heroines staring out at a landscape of bad choices remains.īee and Lucy might have come from money, but as unmarried women they wouldn’t have been able to have bank accounts or apply for credit at any point in their lives, including the 1960s. Lucy and Bee inhabit the American equivalent of crumbling castles, hiding away in a run-down mansion and hanging out by the then-dilapidated Hollywood sign. I admit I expected more trappings of the ’60s, more specific mentions of music and fashion, but I was pleased to find references I didn’t expect: details about cars and drive-ins and the layout of neighborhoods that might as well be Transylvania or the moors to me. But the past comes with you even when you escape not just the places you’re from, but their time period entirely.

In Reluctant Immortals, set in California in the 1960s, Lucy and Bee (as Bertha now calls herself) have found each other and fled to America for something resembling a fresh start. Both of these characters were sidelined in their original novels, fridged before refrigerators existed, and Kiste is on a mission to restore their voices.

Reluctant Immortals features British heiress Lucy Westenra, whom you may recognize as one of Dracula’s victims from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, and the Jamaican Creole character Bertha Mason, whom you might not remember as the madwoman Rochester confined in the attic in Jane Eyre (1847). Gwendolyn Kiste would like to remind us all, however, that it’s always been a horror novel. Being a woman in America does feel a little bit like being in a horror novel these days.

Reluctant immortals