A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut novel: in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—in truth, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons.

We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster?

Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers sleep: animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then she eliminates the threat, and sows seeds of hope in her wake.

The village Kopri...

A heady, dark-hued Gothic gem of a debut novel: in nineteenth-century Bulgaria, a self-proclaimed vampire slayer—in truth, a traveling con artist—joins forces with a teenage girl to create a monster deadly enough to vanquish their own demons.

We make monsters in order to destroy them. For thousands of years, we’ve named witches and burned them, suspected demons and exorcised them. When crops die and children fall ill, who better to blame than a monster?

Yana rides from one desolate town to the next, staging grisly displays while the villagers sleep: animal corpses in the public square, eggs filled with blood in the chicken coop. She tells the stricken villagers stories of vampires that stalk the night. Then she eliminates the threat, and sows seeds of hope in her wake.

The village Kopri...